This article originally appeared in the Augusta Free-Press.
I: The Metamorphosis of PCA
For much of my life, I’ve followed the Chicago Cubs like a cart follows a horse, tethered to the thing in front of me by forces beyond my control. I was indoctrinated into Cubbie fandom from a young age by the undeniable thrill of Steroid Era Sammy Sosa. My parents bought me a fitted Cubs hat, which I wore religiously until it disintegrated, and an authentic Kerry Wood jersey, which I cared for like a pet. I spent lazy summer days rooting for the Cubs from the comfort of my air-conditioned middle-class living room, unaware that, inning-by-inning, these games were rewiring my DNA in ways that would make me a lifelong fan of the Northsiders, sometimes against my will.
Point being: I’ve watched a lot of Cubs baseball through the years. I’ve seen many prospects that were pegged as the next big thing fail to reach their potential (Corey Patterson, Kevin Orie, Felix Pie), while others lived up to the hype, but saw their best years cut short by injuries (Kerry Wood and Mark Prior). Prospects are a tricky business: just because a guy is lighting it up in the minors doesn’t mean his success will translate to the next level. The leap from AAA to the Big Show is substantial, like jumping from the kiddie pool into the deep end. Some guys learn how to swim, while others flail around for a while before returning to safer waters. Some drown altogether, from injury, exhaustion, or apathy.
Pete Crow-Armstrong, the Cubs’ 23-year-old centerfielder, didn’t immediately know how to swim. He made his Major League debut in 2023, but didn’t become an everyday starter until 2024. It was clear from watching him last year that he possessed a dynamic blend of skills: Gold Glove-caliber defense, a rocket launcher for an arm, speed like a cheetah engulfed in flames, and even a decent amount of pop in his bat. That last skill, his power, didn’t unfurl until the back half of last season, when he hit nine homers over a 60-game stretch after hitting just one in his first 63. The Cubs missed the playoffs, thanks to a two-month mid-summer slump where their offense went flaccid as Flarp, but the way PCA played down the stretch set the stage for a promising 2025.
At the onset of spring training, the baseball pundits yapped their gums about what a great addition Kyle Tucker was to the Cubs’ lineup. He certainly was, but if you would’ve asked me which player I was most excited about, I would’ve said PCA, and initially I would’ve looked like an absolute dunce: seventeen games into the season, he was hitting just .197 with no home runs and an OPS 200 points below the league average. I started to wonder if the flashes of greatness he’d shown in 2024 were just that: flashes. A demotion to AAA didn’t seem out of the question, that’s how bad it was going for him, but on April 13th against the Dodgers, in the 18th game of the season, he hit two home runs, and since then, has gone on a dizzying tear that has secured his status as an all-star and a legitimate National League MVP candidate. His ascension to stardom has been brisk and disorienting. He became the fourth-fastest player in Major League history to hit 20 home runs and steal 20 bases. He’s on pace for the first 40/40 season in Cubs history. He snagged a ball earlier this month that had a 0-percent catch probability off the bat. Lastly, he has the second-highest WAR in all of baseball, trailing only Aaron Judge, who I think we can all agree is actually a Transformer.
My favorite PCA moment this year, and there are a lot of them (including this go-ahead grand slam), came on June 17 against the Brewers. In the top of the eighth, he made a diving catch I don’t think anyone else in the league could’ve made. Then he led off the bottom of the inning by launching the first pitch he saw 452 feet off the right field scoreboard, which play-by-play announcer Boog Sciambi punctuated by half-shouting, half-growling “off the scoreboard!” This is a refrain my four-year-old son, Conley, and I repeat randomly throughout the day, sometimes while wearing our matching powder blue PCA shirseys my wife got us for Father’s Day…a piece of apparel I value as much as that Kerry Wood jersey I owned as a kid.
I don’t think anyone who follows baseball has been surprised that PCA has blossomed into one of the best defenders and base stealers in the game. The insane catches he’s made this year are exactly the kind of plays he’s been making his entire career. What I don’t think anyone saw coming was his metamorphosis into one of the league’s most intimidating power hitters. Not even the most fearless betting man would’ve put money on him having more than 20 home runs by the All-Star Break. Yet here we are, and there he is.
Why am I telling you this? Why should you care? America, as a collective, doesn’t give a damn about baseball, so why should you waste your time reading about some 23-year-old kid who wears earrings and once sported blue hair? Because even though PCA is the most exhilarating player the Cubs have seen since Sosa (sorry, Javy Baez), he also has flaws, and flaws are inherently interesting. The nadir of his season thus far was a play against the Cardinals at the end of June in which he forgot how many outs there were after catching a fly ball, allowing Masyn Wynn to tag up and score what ended up being the winning run…from second base. It was bad, like, really bad, and that moment, in retrospect, seems like an inflection point in PCA’s season. How he responds to that mental faux pas, and the subsequent mini-slump that followed (he hit just .194 with no home runs from June 26-July 3), will give us a better understanding of who he is as a player. Can he sustain MVP-caliber numbers for an entire season? Or was the PCA we saw in May and June like a comet in the night sky: gorgeous for a moment, then gone forever?
What I don’t think anyone saw coming was his metamorphosis into one of the league’s most intimidating power hitters. Not even the most fearless betting man would’ve put money on him having more than 20 home runs by the All-Star Break. Yet here we are, and there he is.
His fortunes seem to be on the upswing after hitting two home runs against the Cardinals on July 4, but there are still two-and-a-half months to go, and that’s not even counting the postseason, which the Cubs should make unless they go all Flarpy again in August and September. Nothing in baseball is guaranteed. Just ask all of those Cubs prospects who didn’t pan out.
II: I Just Want PCA to Love Himself
It seems like PCA is often too hard on himself. He’ll throw his helmet after hitting a weak ground ball, or slam his bat after striking out. Some people consider this poor sportsmanship, and I guess it is, but I see it as a sign that he feels like he’s failed as a human being if he isn’t consistently flawless. I wonder: does he feel as though his self-worth is defined by his success as a baseball player, as if the things he’s judged on in everyday life, like integrity, honesty, trustworthiness, etc, are insignificant? Would he be considered a failure if he decided to retire tomorrow and go into real estate (like the aforementioned Kevin Orie) or if he changed his name, took up yoga, and started his own marijuana business (like former NFL great Ricky Williams)? I wonder if he could benefit from a technique my therapist taught me to use when I feel a wave of shame swelling within me: I invite my inner child into the room and do what world-famous psychologist Brené Brown preaches: talk to yourself like you would to someone you love. And whaddaya know, it works. You have to do it over-and-over again, because the mind is a muscle that must be exercised daily, but in the moment, it helps stave off those pesky shame spirals. I say this because maybe PCA could benefit from a little self-care.
Of course I can’t know for sure that a warped sense of self-worth is the root cause of PCA’s displays of frustration. After all, I’m just a middle-aged guy in a recliner watching him play at a vast remove, but I feel like it is, because I used to slam bats and throw helmets all the time when I played high school ball. Why did I do that? Because even the most commonplace failures seemed to jeopardize who I was on a cellular level. I didn’t have the emotional tools, or the mental perspective, to separate my personal life from my athletic life, to understand that my on-field mistakes didn’t make me a bad person. And let’s not forget: PCA is only 23-years-old, far closer in age to a high schooler than a wizened middle-aged suburban dad, so maybe he’s having trouble separating those things, too, though it’s entirely possible I’m just projecting my personal experiences onto him. It’s during PCA’s moments of self-frustration that I feel the urge to mail him an index card with a Brené Brown quote written on it, probably in cursive because that feels more inspirational, something like: worthiness doesn’t have prerequisites. No return address, no signature, nothing: just an index card with a kind message I hope he’ll take to heart.
PCA has almost certainly been on the fast-track to the Majors since he was a teenager, and that single-minded commitment has perhaps knitted his identity as a ballplayer so closely with his self-worth that it feels impossible to separate the two. Maybe he’s conflating home runs as right and errors as wrong, like I used to. I want to say to him, Pete, this isn’t true…you’re alive on this Earth, and that is enough. I want to send him another index card with another Brené Brown quote on it: You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging. By this point, he’ll probably start wondering what weirdo keeps sending him cryptic uplifting messages written in ornate cursive. If he even opens my letters at all, which I’m sure he won’t, because he’s busy grinding through a brutal 162-game season.
It’s during PCA’s moments of self-frustration that I feel the urge to mail him an index card with a Brené Brown quote written on it, probably in cursive because that feels more inspirational, something like: worthiness doesn’t have prerequisites. No return address, no signature, nothing: just an index card with a kind message I hope he’ll take to heart.
The other day, my wife asked: do you think PCA has any hobbies outside of baseball? Do you think he, like, knits or enjoys birdwatching, or does anything to destress? Both of his parents are actors, so who knows, maybe he’s working on a one-man film that he plans to release at Sundance. It’s not a question I’d ever thought to ask, though, whether or not baseball players care about anything other than baseball, because as sports fans we often view athletes as horses bred to win races that cease to exist after the race is run. It should go without saying that this isn’t a healthy lens with which to perceive other humans.
I like to think my wife has made me a more sympathetic person. A more grounded person. I now see baseball players as actual people, which is an objectively insane sentence to have written. I don’t jeer PCA when he messes up, although, admittedly, I sometimes feel the urge to do so. I’d rather climb through the television and give him a hug. I want to remind him, as a man 13 years his senior, that even though he wants to succeed so he can secure that lucrative contract extension, he’s not a bad person if he plays poorly, and vice versa.
Pete, if you’re reading this, which you definitely aren’t, I want you to know that what you do on the baseball field has no bearing on who you are on the inside. Sure, you’re defined as a player by what you do on the field, but you’re not defined as a person by who you are as a player. You wouldn’t be any less worthy if you never played another professional game, though your wallet may be (a lot) skinnier. The Cubs fan in me wants to see you maintain your MVP trajectory, but the human in me knows that it’s OK if you don’t. I just want you to love yourself. If you already do, cool, that’s great, just ignore me and go back to hitting 450-foot home runs. But if not, then every time you have the urge to throw your helmet or slam your bat, I want you to close your eyes, conjure up your inner child, and tell that innocent little guy, gently: imperfections aren’t inadequacies; they are reminders we’re all in this together.
That’s a Brené Brown quote, too.
All images created by Google Gemini.
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