Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong once brushed off Los Angeles Dodgers fans as people who show up for photos, and they booed his every plate appearance in April. Seven months later, the 24-year-old beat Dodgers hero Shohei Ohtani in the MVP race, and now holds a unanimous NL MVP with 45 homers and 41 steals.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
Asked about being mentioned alongside the sport’s elite, Crow-Armstrong kept his answer simple during his MLB Network interview after Thursday night’s announcement.
“I think it’s just the fact that I want to be better than I was the day before,” Crow-Armstrong said. “Really, that’s been all I’ve needed to motivate myself for really as long as I can remember.”
Few players have ever backed up a daily-improvement mantra this loudly. His May ended at .237/.325/.388 before a midseason swing adjustment pushed him to .302/.397/.668. His chase rate fell from 41.7% in 2025 to 34.2%, his walk rate climbed from 4.5% to 11.4%, and he led MLB with 9.8 Baseball Reference WAR. He also credited the Cubs clubhouse for giving him room to grow.
“I’ve been lucky to be in really good clubhouses my first, you know, parts of four seasons up here,” Crow-Armstrong said after the announcement. “They give me patience and a lot of runway to be myself and succeed that way.”
That runway paid off over a full slate. Crow-Armstrong played all 162 games from the leadoff spot, scored 119 runs, piled up 357 total bases, and posted a 157 wRC+ that led the NL. He also took home the Hank Aaron Award and the Platinum Glove, becoming the first player to win both in the same season.
That all-around dominance flipped a race that Shohei Ohtani, the Dodgers’ two-way star, led into July with an 8-2 record and a 1.79 ERA through 14 starts. Knee soreness ended his pitching season after July 3, and knee, neck, and biceps issues dragged down his bat late, landing him on the 15-day injured list in September. His .889 OPS and 30 homers still made him the runner-up, with 26 second-place votes across all 30 ballots, yet the gap in value was wide.
Ohtani’s bat and his 85 2/3 innings were worth 3.2 WAR apiece, while Crow-Armstrong’s offense was worth 8.3 and his glove 2.1. The finish ended Ohtani’s two-year run as NL MVP, though he still joined Ted Williams as the only player to land in the top three of their league’s MVP voting in six straight seasons played.
Few evaluators saw that kind of full-season output coming when he was drafted.
Pete Crow-Armstrong Turned a Glove-First Prospect Into a Complete Star
The New York Mets drafted Crow-Armstrong 19th overall in 2020 out of high school, and scouts pegged him as a glove-and-speed center fielder with limited power. His first 136 big-league games yielded only 10 home runs. The 76 he has launched across 2025 and 2026 rewrote that scouting report.
“You combine the talent and commitment of what he has, and you get what we just saw this year,” Crow-Armstrong’s former Harvard-Westlake coach Jared Halpert said after flying to Chicago for the celebration. “It was remarkable.”
“It’s been a nice, steady progression for the first five years of my career,” Crow-Armstrong said in January at O’Malley Field, where his Harvard-Westlake jersey number was painted on the outfield wall. “I’m definitely learning a good set of patience that I didn’t have before that.”
That steady progression showed in his mechanics. A tweaked stance and higher leg kick lifted his isolated power from .148 in 2024 to .291 this year, and he joined the 40-40 club as its seventh member with 107 RBIs.
The rise carries extra weight back home, as he is the first Southern California product to win NL MVP since Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Christian Yelich in 2018, which gives Harvard-Westlake, long known for pitchers, a hitter to brag about.