Pete Crow-Armstrong went 4-for-6 with three home runs and six RBI Saturday, and it still wasn’t the most interesting number next to his name — that’s the 8.6 WAR that leads all of baseball entering the day. The Cubs blew out the Reds 17-5 at Wrigley Field, and Crow-Armstrong did it with a first-inning solo shot off Andrew Abbott, a second-inning two-run blast off Abbott again, and a seventh-inning three-run bomb off Tony Santillan, according to NBC Sports. First three-home-run game of his career.
His season line is now .282/.377/.567, 36 home runs, 89 RBI, 97 runs, and 32 stolen bases. Per the Sun-Times, that WAR figure has him ahead of Shohei Ohtani, whose pitching return this season keeps getting cloudier as a lingering knee issue drags on. That’s 8.6 FanGraphs WAR, 7.9 by Baseball-Reference — pick your flavor, he’s still first. Ohtani’s grip on the NL MVP race is slipping, and Pete Crow-Armstrong’s MVP case in 2026 stopped being an underdog argument sometime in the last two weeks.
Then there’s the 40-40 chase, and it is four homers and eight steals away from happening — a mark no Cub has ever hit. The club is six names deep — Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Alfonso Soriano, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Shohei Ohtani, per Bleacher Nation — and a franchise that’s never once produced one of them.
None of that is the actual story.
The actual story is that MLB’s account picked its guy.
https://x.com/MLB/status/2094086614385397808
https://x.com/MLBStats/status/2094073354458140933
MLB Stats spent Saturday pairing Crow-Armstrong with 2018 Mookie Betts — the AL MVP season, the 1.078 OPS — as the only two players with a leadoff homer, a walk-off homer, a cycle, and a three-homer game in the same year. That’s MLB’s framing, not an independently verified historical record, but the league doesn’t spend its own platform hyping a 24-year-old center fielder’s trivia unless it already wants the casual viewer Googling him by October.
Crow-Armstrong has been stacking these moments since June. He hit for the cycle against Colorado in reverse order, the first Cub since Carson Kelly and the first cycle by anyone at Wrigley since Mark Grace in 1993. He followed it with a leadoff homer and a walk-off homer in the same game against the White Sox on Aug. 17, his 30th of the year, the first player to pull that off since Chris Young in 2010.
I watched that walk-off swing three separate times this week and it looked more inevitable each time, which isn’t a sentence I write about many 24-year-olds.
The Cubs are clinging to the top NL Wild Card spot against a field that keeps closing ground, and the Reds they just beat by twelve are sitting last in the NL Central. They’re back at Wrigley tonight anyway, for Sunday Night Baseball on NBC and Peacock, first pitch 7 p.m. ET, with Saturday’s three-home-run game barely a day cold. That’s not why any of this matters, though. It matters because a league that rarely tips its hand just told its casual audience exactly who to watch.
MLB didn’t discover Pete Crow-Armstrong. It picked him.
