That\u2019s decent, but I don\u2019t know if I\u2019d call it plus power or anything; Crow-Armstrong\u2019s EV90 in 2025 was 81st out of 145 qualified hitters. That\u2019s where the other two changes come in. As a rookie, PCA had a 79.2% Z-Contact%. Anything below 80% in that mark is survivable, but it\u2019s hard to thrive in that range without truly elite power. In 2025, he raised his in-zone contact rate to 83.8%.<\/p>\n
Third: He is getting the absolute maximum out of what contact he makes. The most valuable batted balls, in general, are hit in the air and to the pull side. In 2024, Crow-Armstrong put 19.3% of his batted balls in that direction, which is above average, even good. In 2025, that number was 30.2%, which was the seventh-highest figure out of 251 players on Baseball Savant\u2019s leaderboard.<\/p>\n
Crow-Armstrong hit 31 home runs last year because he got the absolute maximum out of his plate discipline and quality-of-contact numbers. Add in the defense and the baserunning, and I think this might literally be the best all-around baseball player you could have with a 4.5% walk rate and a .247 batting average.<\/p>\n
But he\u2019s still a player with a .247 batting average and a 4.5% walk rate. Or, to use the more legible figure I mentioned above, a .287 OBP. Last year, Crow-Armstrong made more outs per plate appearance than Nick Castellanos, Lenyn Sosa, and Ke\u2019Bryan Hayes. Is it possible to be a franchise player if that\u2019s true? We\u2019ll find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That\u2019s decent, but I don\u2019t know if I\u2019d call it plus power or anything; Crow-Armstrong\u2019s EV90 in 2025…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2399],"tags":[5,138,24,35090,4245,161,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-653108","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago-cubs","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-chicago-cubs","11":"tag-chicago-cubs-analysis","12":"tag-chicagocubs","13":"tag-cubs","14":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116319954254150899","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}