The thing about Chicago Cubs centerfielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is that he’s hated basically everywhere except Wrigley Field. I discovered this firsthand when I went to a Cubs/Pirates game in Pittsburgh earlier this year and listened to a chorus of boooos rain down upon him every time he came to the plate.
There was one fan a few rows behind me, possibly slightly drunk, whose apparent life-purpose was to shout YOU SUCK, PETE! every time PCA was within earshot, which was kind of awkward, because my 5-year-old son and I were wearing baby blue PCA shirts.
Since that game, I’ve noticed that Pete really does get vehemently booed everywhere except Wrigley Field; St. Louis, New York, Los Angeles, it doesn’t matter: whenever he’s on the road, it feels like he’s being followed by a gang of disgruntled ghosts.
I get why opposing fans hate him. I’d hate him, too, if he played for another team. The majority of professional ballplayers keep their emotions under wraps, but Pete consistently lets it all hang out. He’s not above doing a cocky little bat flip after launching a ball 450 feet off the right field scoreboard. Nor does he shy away from shouting FUCK! when he hits a dinky little pop up in the infield. At first, I thought this excessive emotional expression was a symptom of Pete putting too much pressure on himself, and maybe it is, but as time has gone on, I’ve come to think that perhaps it’s just who he is, that he’s the kind of person who has to play with an elevated sense of passion to maintain an internal fire.
You could argue, from a mental health perspective, that his hyperbolic expressiveness might actually be healthy: instead of keeping everything bottled up, he’s releasing it all in the moment then moving on, so as not to be bogged down later in the game. On the flipside, you could argue that he’s just an immature brat who can’t regulate his emotions; he doesn’t, after all, set a good example for the children: I’ve had to explain to my son that, no, you shouldn’t shout FUCK! so loudly after striking out that the broadcast microphone picks it up, and no, you shouldn’t showboat after you hit a dinger, regardless of the awesomeness of said dinger.
Opposing fans hate Pete’s theatrics because they think it makes him a childish jerk. Cubs fans love them because they think it proves that he actually cares.
Both are probably right.
None of Pete’s melodramatics would matter if he wasn’t good, but he is good … like, really good. He’s the first guy to give Shohei Ohtani, perhaps the greatest player in the history of the sport, a run for his money as National League MVP. Ohtani, the only player since Babe Ruth to both pitch and hit at a high level (and he arguably does both better than Ruth), has won four MVPs in his career and has been a lock for the award in the NL since he joined the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2024. Yet Pete is having such a dynamic season that there’s a valid case to be made for him being more valuable to the Cubs than Ohtani has been to the Dodgers.
Yes, Ohtani pitches, and yes, he’s a Cy Young-caliber talent when he does, but being a two-way player puts such a strain on his body that the majority of the time he’s not even able to pitch: he threw only 47 innings in 2025, and hasn’t made an appearance on the mound this year since July 3, after being restricted to hitting-only due to knee and bicep issues. Pete, meanwhile, is having one of the best defensive seasons in Major League history while amassing the following stat line: a .281 average, a .920 OPS, 27 home runs, 73 RBI, and 30 stolen bases.
When he’s at his best, he’s like Rickey Henderson (speed), Willie Mays (general defensive prowess), Roberto Clemente (arm strength), Barry Bonds (power), Cal Ripken (durability), and Carlos Zambrano (emotional volatility) all rolled into a pale, skinny, 24-year-old frame.
Pete also has anecdote on his side, in the sense that he has a knack for meeting the moment. The first instance I’m thinking of occurred on May 30 in St. Louis, and involved what has become known as the Tarps Off club, which, as far as I can tell, is a massive contingent of bros who buy cheap tickets in the right field stands and pride themselves on being loud and obnoxious and generally youthy. Pete was hitting only .230 on the season when he walked to the plate in the top of the eighth that night. The Tarps Off Bros (TOBs) started chanting OVERRATED! so loudly that you could hear it on the television broadcast, and Pete responded by blasting a home run right to them, then mocking them by waving an invisible shirt, lasso-like, over his head. It was, dare I say, Ruthian in its epicness, the kind of story that gets passed down through the generations as a sort of micro-encapsulation of a player at the peak of his powers.
Now when Pete comes to bat at Busch Stadium, the TOBs turn their backs on him and fall completely silent … which kind of feels like an admission of defeat, and also an invitation for Pete to give one of them a concussion by drilling them in the back of the head with another home run.
Pete’s homer into the St. Louis TOBs catalyzed a mid-season turnaround and set him on his current path to challenging Ohtani as the best player in the game. The two MVP candidates faced off in early August when the Dodgers came to Wrigley, and Pete went tit-for-tat with Shohei in the final game of the series, matching his two home runs and leading the Cubs to a 7-6 victory and, eventually, a three-game sweep – no small task against the two-time defending champion Death Star Dodgers.
It was during this series that pundits began earnestly discussing Pete as a legitimate MVP candidate, and he furthered his case the day after going swing-for-swing with Ohtani: tied at two in the bottom of the 11th against the Toronto Blue Jays, he daringly stole third, then, when the throw deflected off the third baseman’s mitt, trotted home to give the Cubs their 11th walk-off win of the season.
“He can get you in so many ways,” said wild-haired play-by-play announcer Boog Sciambi as the Cubs celebrated on the infield, and truer more banal words have never been spoken.
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The question always with Pete, even – or especially – when he’s playing so well that it feels like he may never come down is can he maintain? This worry is back-of-mind even for his biggest fans, because we’ve been burnt by Pete’s streakiness in the past: he was the MVPete version himself in the first-half of last season, becoming only the third player in MLB history to hit 25 home runs and steal 25 bases before the All-Star break, but he scuffled down the stretch, hitting just.216 with six home runs over the final 81 games.
His flaccid ending to last year bled into 2026, and by the end of May, he was hitting just .237 with no real power or zest to speak of. He was still stealing bags and playing phenomenal defense, sure, but it seemed like the world-beating version of himself may have been a fever dream, a mirage, a flash in the pan.
I’d personally made peace with the fact that I might never see that heightened version of Pete again, that perhaps he was destined to become merely a pretty good ballplayer instead of one of the best of his generation.
Then in June, Pete, in typical Pete fashion, exploded for one the most prolific months in baseball history, hitting .381 with 11 home runs, 20 RBI, and collecting an OPS of 1.249. This otherworldly month re-established him as an MVP candidate, and though he’s cooled down in the intervening weeks, he hasn’t fallen off a cliff like he’s done in the past.
There are encouraging reasons (based on advanced metrics that I won’t bore you with) to believe that Pete’s slumps, going forward, will be much less extreme, that his new lows will be far less pit-of-hell-like. But until he’s able to prove this over the course of at least a couple of seasons, Cubs fans will continue to harbor a latent anxiety as they wait for the moment when MVPete reverts to StinkyPete, as it were, and starts flailing at breaking balls out of the zone or, God forbid, forgetting how many outs there are after catching a fly ball. All we can do, as Cubs fans, is pray that StinkyPete has been locked in a windowless cellar somewhere, starved of nutrition, never to see the light of day again.
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I’ll have a chance to watch Pete at Wrigley later this month, when my 5-year-old son and I will join in the chorus of adoring cheers from thousands of red, white, and blue-clad Cubs fans while wearing our baby blue PCA shirts. Those cheers must feel so good to Pete, like a warm aural hug from an adoring grandparent. But he would do well to remember, as he no doubt already does, that there’s a direct correlation between the volume of the boos he receives on the road and the trajectory of his career: the more intense the hate, the more he’s doing right. Pete should only be concerned if opposing fans stop booing him; that would mean he’s no longer significant enough to waste even a jeer on.
I don’t see that happening any time soon, maybe ever, because I believe in Pete. I’m confident he’s entered a more sustainable phase of his career, one that consists of disciplined swing decisions and mature plate appearances, though I’m sure he’ll continue to bodaciously flip his bat post-homer and drop audible F-bombs when he doesn’t live up to his own lofty expectations.
Opposing fans will surely boo him for many years to come, and he might just ride those boos all the way to Cooperstown, right alongside his old foe Shohei Ohtani. But that’s a conversation that won’t take place until very far in the future: Pete is still so young, and there are many games to be played, seasons to be slogged through, fates to be decided. It’s going to be wild to see how it all unfolds, and for Pete’s sake, I hope that gang of disgruntled ghosts continues to hound him wherever he goes. That way he knows he’s on the right track.
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