Collette Calls: Eating Crow-Armstrong

I'm not into cannibalism, but I've put this article off long enough. It's not as if I was waiting for Pete Crow-Armstrong to cool off, but even if he were to stop playing today, he is easily going to finish better than what my bold prediction declared back in early January:

Pete Crow-Armstrong is not a top-60 outfielder (ADP 133)

Let's start off bold! PCA is currently 32nd by ADP at the outfield position, going as high as 80th overall. I almost envision folks looking at PCA and thinking back to this time last season when Jarren Duran had an ADP of 161, hoping to strike gold twice with what are perceived to be similar skillsets.....Yes, both players can fly in the field and on the basepaths, but the rest of the comparison simply doesn't hold up on paper. The tale of the tape shows a 28-year-old Duran at 6'2" and 205 pounds against a 5'11", 184-pound, 22-year-old in Armstrong.

The physical maturity advantage alone made it easier to see Duran's power potential at the major-league level. Perhaps this is my own personal Post Traumatic Kevin Kiermaier disorder, but I see PCA more like Kiermaier than I do Duran. I see a player's whose most redeeming skill (speed) is entirely dependent upon one of his worst skills (getting on base).....

We have seen three players in recent history steal as many as 30 bases in a season with a sub-.300 OBP:

Billy Hamilton with 56 in 2014
Carlos Gomez with 33 in 2008
Bobby Witt Jr. with 30 in 2022

Crow-Armstrong is a lot closer to Gomez than he is Witt Jr. and someone I associate with more risk than I do upside and want to avoid a draft build which forces me to take the chance on his speed knowing the associated risks with this skillset.

As I check the current Earned Auction Values board on the site, only Aaron Judge has earned more than Crow- Armstrong this season. Judge has earned $55 in standard leagues, while Crow-Armstrong and Shohei Ohtani are tied in second place with $45 earned.

I stand behind the process of looking back at players with similar extreme profiles featuring high strikeout rates and low OBPs as rookies, but the conclusion that PCA was closer to Gomez than he was to Witt Jr. has turned out be laughably wrong. The only thing left to do is to look at what changes PCA has made which have helped him evolve into the star we are watching in 2025.

The amusing thing, at least to me, is that some of the concerns I had for PCA are still very prevalent. As play begins on June 16, he has a .301 on-base percentage, and both his walk rate and strikeout rate have worsened from last season. Yet, PCA is 23 of 26 in steals and has already clubbed 18 home runs while scoring 51 times and driving in 57 runs. He has already exceeded every counting category from 2024 except for steals in 110 fewer plate appearances while raising his batting average by 31 points. The simple fact remains that from a discipline perspective, the only real change for Crow-Armstrong is that he has improved his overall swing and miss rate even while his strikeout rate and walk rate has worsened:

The noticeable change has come in how Crow-Armstrong is putting balls into play. He has both increased his flyball rate by 10 full percentage points while also increasing the percentage of pulled flyballs by 11 percentage points. Half of his 2024 homers were pulled homers, while a majority of his 2025 homers have been of the pull variety:

Note both the change in his pull tendences in the spray chart for his flyballs as well as the lack of infield hits. This is no longer someone being overpowered in the box; he is controlling the narrative in the box and is now punishing fastballs. Crow-Armstrong hit four homers off fastballs last season; he is already at 11 this season. 

What we can't know, until we see it, is what process or mechanical changes a player is willing to make. Despite the success Crow-Armstrong had last year, he was willing to make adjustments, and Mark DeRosa did an outstanding job of breaking these changes down last month on MLB Network (jump to the 3:13 mark of the video if it doesn't launch as such): 

We can see from that video how Crow-Armstrong has made demonstrable changes to his stance and how he engages his lower half. DeRosa went on to show the changes Crow-Armstrong has made in where he sets up in the box, with the young outfielder now deeper in the box with his stance. 

It's clear that this is not the same PCA that we saw struggle at times last year and the one that scared me coming into the season. The challenge now becomes figuring out just how sustainable this profile is, because his speed certainly helps cover some of his overall flaws. Compare his StatCast Percentile Rankings to a mystery player: 

These two profiles are rather similar in composition, and yet Crow-Armstrong has earned $45 this season while the player profile on the right, Adolis Garcia, has earned just $6. Current success does not guarantee future success, and baseball is a humbling game. As much as I believed in the circumstances around this bold prediction, it looks horribly wrong to date and is on track to be one of my more high-profile swing and misses in my annual bold prediction series. 

Yet, this is still a batter striking out once every 3.8 at-bats who is on pace to walk just 30 times this season. Dante Bichette hit 40 homers in Colorado in 1995 with similar conditions, while Alfonso Soriano hit 39 for the Yankees in 2002 with the same profile. Since 2015, the most homers we've seen from a player who has similarly drawn so few walks with an AB/K ratio between 3.8 and 4.0 is Scooter Gennett with his 27 homers in 2017. Removing the range filter and isolating down to all players with an AB/K <= 3.8 gives us two players with 30+ homers in Rougned Odor in 2016 and Eddie Rosario in 2019. Crow-Armstrong is at 18 already and pacing to 40, so he will either defy recent history, or the current doubling of his home run to fly ball ratio from last year will sustain, and he'll cruises through the summer and continue to make my prediction look 10 times more foolish than it was bold. 

I hope you continue to enjoy what he is doing on your rosters because I did not end up with him on any of mine. That said, my eyes still do not believe what we have seen, because Crow-Armstrong is doing something unprecedented and my experience tells me the league always adjusts.