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Pete Crow-Armstrong’s professional baseball career was almost over before it even started. Before the 23-year-old center fielder was an incandescent star for the Chicago Cubs, a first-time All-Star, and a serious MVP candidate, he was a first-round draft pick by the New York Mets in 2020. That meant that his early days with the Mets’ organization were spent mired in the pandemic—and the speedy, hotshot Southern Californian outfielder committed a big no-no on day one.
“I showed up late for my COVID test on the very first day!” Crow-Armstrong tells me. “My very first day showing face as the first-rounder, slept two hours late. Fucking ran out of the house in what I slept in, shorts and a [tank top].” As Crow-Armstrong remembers it, the Mets farm director—who was a big proponent of drafting him in the first place—gave it to him straight.
“He was like, ‘Dude, if you ever do this again, you’re not going to play.’”
That summer, Crow-Armstrong (or PCA, if you prefer) was fresh out of high school at Harvard-Westlake, the prestigious LA prep school that counts everyone from Shirley Temple to the Gyllenhaal siblings to Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner as alumni. While surely the Mets would have looked past a few transgressions to eventually find a place for their prized prospect to play—and COVID canceled the 2020 minor league season, anyway—this story beautifully illustrates how much growing up Crow-Amstrong has had to do in the last five years.
“I was a dumbass 18-year-old,” he readily admits. “I was like, holy fuck. I finally get out of LA and I get to go play baseball.”
And then you blow it on day one.
“Really fucking smart, dude. Awesome.”
This is PCA in a nutshell: he’s perennially self-deprecating with a tremendous sense of humor, but he still radiates effortless cool. In classic Angeleno fashion, both of his parents are actors. His mom, Ashley Crow, starred in the ’90s baseball classic Little Big League, while his dad, Matthew John Armstrong, logged three seasons on the NBC drama American Dreams. Both were also in the show Heroes. But don’t get it twisted. PCA grew up around kids who were rich rich. As we joke about classmates having Marvel money and parents who let them throw lavish house parties, Crow-Armstrong tells me his story about being a child of the industry. “My parents always made jokes about the residuals,” he says. “My dad would—not to knock any sort of payday—but he’d be like, ‘Oh, I got paid three cents.’ We’re all in the house, like, ‘Yeah!’”
Crow-Armstrong and I are sitting in a lower Manhattan coffee shop that can best be described as vibey. There are enormous, verdant plants all around the room. Clairo is pouring out of the speakers and later, a song by Thee Sacred Souls, which delights him because they used to be in his walk-up song rotation. PCA is in town for the Cubs’ series against the Yankees, and with a whole morning to kill before reporting to the stadium, he orders an iced Americano and settles into his chair, looking very much in his element. His carrot-orange curls are hidden beneath an Aimé Leon Dore hat. There’s a silver hoop in his left ear, and a long sleeve Adidas shirt covers the litany of tattoos on his arms.
He’s also brought along his girlfriend, Hailey, and tells me that they dined at Balthazar the night before. They’ve been together for almost a year and a half now, he shares proudly, and casually drops that their relationship was born at Vanessa Hudgens’ wedding in Tulum. (Hudgens’ husband, Cole Tucker, played parts of six seasons in the big leagues and has a little brother, Carson, whom PCA calls “one of my best friends.”)
For a still developing baseball player, Crow-Armstrong possesses a laidback confidence that initially wrong foots me a little. In roughly an hour sipping coffee with him, he uses the word “dude” just north of 20 times. This is, after all, the kid who showed up to the Cubs’ first game of the season sporting bleach blond hair with blue stars dyed in. He is one of the only people in the entire MLB universe regularly getting fits off. Given his age, flair, and the star-making season he’s enjoying, I expected something a little more rambunctious. Instead, I get a young man with a clear view of who he is now. “I feel like a different baseball player,” he says, “but I also just feel like a fuller version of who I thought I could be. [This is] what it would look like if the work paid off.”
The story of how PCA ended up with the Cubs goes like this. When minor league baseball resumed in 2021, Crow-Armstrong reported to the Mets’ Single-A team in Port St. Lucie, Florida. After just six games—in which he reached base 18 times—he was waylaid by a shoulder injury that sent him to the operating table. Later that summer, the Mets decided to make a trade deadline splash by acquiring Cubs legend Javier Báez. In return, they gave up their former first-round pick, who had made just 32 professional plate appearances thus far, and was still wearing a sling on his surgically-repaired arm.
I ask Crow-Armstrong if he harbors any bitterness toward the Mets for not only discarding him so early in his career, but also doing so while he was injured. “No,” he responds. “Zero. No bitterness at all. A scrawny kid that doesn't hit for power, played six games, just tore his labrum—how are you going to know who he’s going to be? I don’t blame them...That stung for a second, but that change of scenery really helped. It gave me some hope, I guess.”
Surely the Mets would like a mulligan on that one, especially because that aforementioned lack of power eventually solved itself. Growing up, Crow-Armstrong says it was ingrained in him to spray low line drives all over the field and use his speed to wreak havoc on the opponent. Hitting home runs was not part of his repertoire, until he turned—seemingly overnight—into one of the most feared power hitters in the game. This year, PCA has already sent more balls over the wall than he had in any full season of his pro career, which he says is just as crazy for him as it is to the scouts, coaches, and so-called experts that pegged him as a table-setting slap hitter. He’s currently tied for fourth in the National League in home runs, a testament to both believing in himself and finally sticking to one approach.
“I knew I could do what I’m doing this year,” he says. “I didn’t think that the power numbers would be what they are so quickly. I am surprised about that, for sure. But I’ve also never seen myself play every single day. I’ve never kept the same leg kick, toe tap, anything for more than like two fucking months. This year is the first year that I’ve had a repeatable move. Just simplifying fucking everything.”
Crow-Armstrong says a big point of emphasis this year from Cubs manager Craig Counsell is to give himself some grace, both on and off the field. “Don’t gotta be so perfect and specific with my routines and whatnot,” PCA says of his new approach. “Just relax. Just fucking chill out.”
This copacetic version of PCA is now one of the best players in Major League Baseball. With a deadly combination of speed and power, Crow-Armstrong became the only player in MLB history to hit 25 home runs, steal 25 bases, and drive in 70 runs before the All-Star break. On defense, he’s also something of a box office event. Seemingly every week, there’s a new highlight of him racing into the gap to snare a fly ball, or throwing his body into a wall like a crash test dummy to secure another spectacular catch. Based on Wins Above Replacement, a catch-all stat that measures a player’s overall impact on both sides of the ball, no player in the National League has been better than Crow-Armstrong this year. He’s outpacing perennial MVP contenders like Shohei Ohtani, Francisco Lindor, and Fernando Tatís Jr. He’s electrified the passionate Chicago fanbase. And most importantly, he’s contributed to a lot of winning at Wrigley Field.
To be a part of a winning summer on the North Side, the live wire center fielder explains, is something beyond a dream. “It’s the first time I’ve gotten to see Wrigley like this,” Crow-Armstrong explains. “I mean, they pack the fucking place out all the time. But it’s [different] when you’re winning and packing the place out—there's a real buzz and rumble that goes on.”
When he’s in New York, he says it is inevitable to entertain the what if questions about a world where the Mets never traded him. The buzz of Chicago has been intoxicating, and while he feels a little claustrophobic when he’s in NYC, that doesn’t mean it’s not alluring. “All the time,” he says, repeating it for emphasis, when I ask how often his mind wanders to the subject of being a Met. “It’s really easy, too, because I got friends out here, and it's easy to picture how fun that could have been.” At the same time, he’s eager to make one thing clear: Chicago has his whole heart. “I think it's also easy to just be like, ‘Yeah, you're in the best city.’ Chicago’s like the perfect little bit of everything.”
If you had asked Pete Crow-Armstrong about his experience in Chicago two years ago, he might have had a wildly different answer. After grinding through minor league ball—and bouncing between places like South Bend, Knoxville, and Des Moines along the way—the Cubs called him up to The Show at the tail end of their 2023 campaign. The moment had finally arrived for PCA, the highly-touted speedster whose first employer barely gave him a shot. The Cubs were fighting for the final Wild Card spot that year, too, giving his first taste of Major League Baseball some real spice.
He batted 19 times during that season and came away with zero hits.
It was something worse than a rude awakening, perhaps more like being woken up with a sledgehammer to the stomach. Athletes often talk about their first bout with failure like it’s an old war story, something that had to be endured to become the person they are today. For Crow-Armstrong—a baby-faced stud who’s already atop the baseball world before even discerning the full reach of his potential—the memories of his past ineptitude are fading deeper into the scrapbook.
“My mind goes back to that twice a week,” he says. “But not in the same way I used to. I’m not holding on to that anymore.”