Pete Crow-Armstrong looked like an MVP candidate for the first four months of the 2025 campaign for the Chicago Cubs. He was scorching hot and consistently on base. Then everything fell apart. He hit just .188 inthe last two months. As spring training opens and PCA hopes to be an MVP candidate again, his swing needs to return to his early-season form.
Now, Crow-Armstrong is speaking out about his end-of-season slump and his work with assistant hitting coach John Mallee, per Sahadev Sharma of The Athletic.
“We just noticed that when the setup was out of whack, I wasn’t really getting in the box the same way,” Crow-Armstrong said. “That’s when the swing went to crap, and the mechanical stuff started playing a bigger role in the lack of success.”
Crow-Armstrong was dreadful in August last year. He hit just .160 with a .216 on-base percentage. The 2025 all-star also had just one home run and five RBIs over the month. He improved some in September, hitting three home runs while hitting .224. Still, the two months were a massive drop from the first four months of the campaign.
“He got a little stretched out. He was accelerating in his stride, covering too much ground, which kind of made him a little long, and he was mis-hitting balls. So he went back to staying short like he was earlier in the year,” hitting coach Mallee said. “Small tap, small separation and really rotating in place as opposed to jumping and crashing forward. Kept his head stiller and allowed him to get to more balls consistently.”
Crow-Armstrong finished third in baseball in chase rate in 2025 and was missing the good pitches he was seeing at the end of the season. Now, Crow-Armstrong needs to use his late-season slump as a learning opprotunity.
“As he matures as a hitter, the strike zone will start to shrink,” Mallee added. “It’s not just swinging at balls and strikes, what pitches can he hit against this guy, the locations that he can handle. Over time, the plate discipline gets better.”
The Cubs will be a favorite to win the NL Central this year, and the continued solid play of PCA will be a major part of that.
