Pete Crow-Armstrong was 9 when his father Matt threw down the gauntlet.
Not about school. Not about sports. About the Chicago Cubs.
Matt, 51, grew up a Cubs fan in Naperville, Ill. Both he and his wife, Ashley Crow, were actors, raising Pete, their only child, in Southern California. Matt sensed the Cubs, after hiring Theo Epstein as president of baseball operations and Jed Hoyer as general manager, soon would be on the rise.
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“I said to Pete, they’re bad now. But they’re going to be good eventually,” Matt recalled. “And if you’re not on board by then, you’re not on the bandwagon, dude. You have to suffer in order to join.”
Matt said Pete originally rooted for the Boston Red Sox, growing enamored with the team during its run to the 2004 World Series title. Just 2 1/2 at the time, Pete would pluralize Johnny Damon’s last name, calling him, “Johnny Damons.”
For a time, Pete was a fan of the Cubs’ biggest rival, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Chicago Bears’ biggest NFL rival, the Green Bay Packers.
“I’m convinced there was some part of him that was — I won’t say sadistic, but he wanted to screw with me as much as possible,” Matt said. “He was trolling me, at a very young age.”
Little did either of them know how the story would turn out.
Crow-Armstrong, 23, is now one of the breakout stars of the 2025 season, playing electrifying defense in center field, using his dynamic blend of power and speed to serve as an offensive igniter, captivating fans with his charismatic personality… and doing it all for the Chicago Cubs.
As with so many baseball stories, Crow-Armstrong’s journey could have been quite different. PCA, as he is known, was not drafted by the Cubs. The New York Mets selected him out of Harvard-Westlake H.S. in Los Angeles with the 19th pick of the 2020 draft.
Entering 2021, Crow-Amstrong’s first full pro season, The Athletic’s Keith Law ranked him the 94th best prospect in the game and the Mets’ fourth-best, behind catcher Francisco Alvarez, infielder Ronny Mauricio and right-hander Matt Allan.
Baseball America and MLB Pipeline rated Crow-Armstrong slightly lower, excluding him from their top 100 and the Mets’ top four.
In May of that season, after playing only six games at Low A, Crow-Armstrong underwent season-ending surgery to repair a torn labrum in his right shoulder. When the Mets, leading the NL East, sought help from the Cubs at the trade deadline, Crow-Armstrong was rehabilitating at their spring-training site in Port St. Lucie, Fla.
“We were really fortunate. If he’s playing, we’re never getting him,” Hoyer said. “His defensive numbers would have been great, and they probably would have said no.”
The Mets wanted infielder Javier Báez, a potential free agent. Crow-Armstrong was not the Cubs’ initial target. Early in the negotiations, Hoyer kept asking for Allan, who recently had undergone Tommy John surgery. The Mets, viewing Allan as a future top-of-the-rotation starter, responded that he was untouchable.
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Mark Vientos, then a corner infielder and outfielder at Triple A, was another player the Mets and Cubs discussed. Mets acting GM Zack Scott, who worked for the Boston Red Sox from 2004 to 2020, carried his old team’s preferences to his new one. The Red Sox liked Vientos but questioned Crow-Armstrong’s bat. Both, Scott said, had little industry value.
“Only two clubs ever brought his name up,” Scott said about Crow-Armstrong. “Texas asked for him for (Joey) Gallo, who had 1 1/2 years of control, but the New York fit scared me. The Cubs were pushing for a different prospect (Allan) and were mixed on PCA.”
Crow-Armstrong, though, had at least one strong advocate in the Cubs’ organization — assistant GM Jared Banner, who joined the Cubs in December 2020 after serving more than two years as the Mets’ farm director.
The Cubs did not have a player with Crow-Armstrong’s defensive and baserunning skills, making him more appealing than Vientos and others. But as the deadline approached, the teams were at a stalemate.
Crow-Armstrong was three draft classes behind Vientos, but the two became close at the Mets’ Instructional League in the fall of 2020. After COVID-19 canceled the minor-league season, it was Crow-Armstrong’s introduction to the organization.
As the 2021 deadline approached, both Crow-Armstrong and Vientos sensed they were involved in trade talks. So, the friends made a pact: If either got moved, they would call the other.
“But it was like, (more) pertaining to him,” Crow-Armstrong said. “We all thought it was going to be Vientos, or somebody else.”
Vientos was in Syracuse, N.Y., with the Mets’ Triple A affiliate. The day of the deadline, Crow-Armstrong’s parents visited him in Port St. Lucie with his agent, Ryan Hamill of CAA.
Crow-Armstrong was driving to meet them for lunch when the news broke.
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“I had a friend text me and he said the Cubs just traded Javy Báez, you think your kid might be involved in that?” Matt Armstrong said. “Me being the expert I am, I was like, ‘No, man, he’s hurt. He’s not on anybody’s radar right now.’ I send that text, and 30 seconds later my phone starts exploding.”
Vientos, true to his word, called Crow-Armstrong.
“He didn’t say anything,” Crow-Armstrong said. “Then in the background — he’s in the clubhouse in Syracuse — I just heard someone say, ‘Holy s—-, Pete Crow got traded.’ At that point, my phone started buzzing.”
The deal shocked Crow-Armstrong. That he was traded for Báez, one of his favorite players, made it even more disorienting.
Crow-Armstrong’s first favorite was Andrew McCutchen, whom he emulated as a power-hitting center fielder. But by the time he was in high school, he fancied Báez, too. He patterned his game after Báez’s, seeking to play with the same energy and flair.
Hoyer said the Mets relented on Crow-Armstrong only after the Cubs included right-hander Trevor Williams and cash to cover a portion of Báez’s remaining $3.96 million salary. The easy, direct communication between Hoyer and Scott helped. The two knew each other well from their days with the Red Sox. Hoyer hired Scott as a baseball operations intern in 2004.
The future, it turns out, was not what anyone envisioned at the time.
Allan underwent two more major elbow operations, going nearly six years between pitching in games before resuming his career at the Mets’ Low A affiliate in April. Vientos overcame a difficult start to his major-league career last season by hitting 32 homers for the Mets, including five in the playoffs. And Crow-Armstrong is emerging as much more of an offensive force than most in the industry expected.
After 31 games, Crow-Armstrong is batting .275 with six homers and an .840 OPS, and is second in the majors with 12 stolen bases. He also leads the majors in Outs Above Average and is tied for the lead in Defensive Runs Saved.
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“Báez was great and Williams was outstanding for (the Mets) in ’22,” Scott said. “But it was obviously a big ‘L’ for future value, and we may be starting to see that value realized four years later.”
Scott, who became the founder and CEO of a consulting firm, Four Rings Sports Solutions, can joke about the trade now.
“When the Cubs win the division and Jed (Hoyer) gets a contract extension, I expect a cut,” he said.
Matt Armstrong’s reaction to the deal was not necessarily what one might expect from a lifelong Cubs fan.
“He didn’t show much emotion that day. My parents have always been really good about keeping it here,” Crow-Armstrong said. “They wanted me to process whatever I needed to and kind of be there for me.”
Said Matt: “Listen, if he was a Cardinal, I’d be wearing Cardinal red. He’s my No. 1 rooting interest. That it was the Cubs was kind of like this insane wrinkle.”
As Matt recalls, most of his friends in the Chicago area were more excited Crow-Armstrong would be a Cub than he was.
He and Ashley were mostly happy that their son would be in Arizona, closer to home, in an area where he knew more people, for the rest of his rehabilitation and spring training.
Another thing: Matt isn’t just a Cubs fan. Crow-Armstrong describes his father as “a big fantasy baseball guy, a baseball nerd.”
Matt is in his ninth year serving as the director of theater arts and an English teacher for high school students at the Sierra Canyon School in Los Angeles. Every year, the school hosts Peak Week, when faculty can conduct a seminar on anything that interests them. Matt teaches a baseball statistics class.
“We dove into advanced metrics while watching entire games or moments in games, compared players from different eras using old-school stats vs. new metrics,” Matt said. “It was pretty cool for them to see while Johan Santana wasn’t Koufax, he wasn’t that far off, either. We watched ‘Moneyball,’ too.”
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The Cubs, though, are never far from Matt’s heart. In 2016, he attended Game 4 of the World Series at Wrigley Field. Friends invited him to attend Games 6 and 7 in Cleveland as well, but those were weekday games. Matt had just started teaching at Sierra Canyon and didn’t want to miss work.
So, he ended up watching the Cubs win the Series with Crow-Armstrong, then 14.
“That was a moment I wouldn’t trade for anything,” Matt said. “I hugged him and I cried on his shoulder like a big old baby. Yeah, it would have been cool to be there for Game 7. But to me, it couldn’t have gotten better. I would rather have had that moment with Pete than with 50,000 strangers.”
Now that Crow-Armstrong is a Cub, Matt said at times he will think to himself, “This isn’t real.” It happened in spring training, when he saw Crow-Armstrong talking to Cubs Hall of Famer Billy Williams, and had a flashback spotting Rick Sutcliffe. Matt recalls attending a clinic at Wrigley as a child, sitting in the bullpen, listening to Sutcliffe and former Cubs pitching coach Billy Connors, thinking Sutcliffe was a giant.
Other kids now look at Crow-Armstrong the same way. This is only his first full season, but fans are drawn to him. During the Cubs’ opening series in Japan, the crowd chanted, “P-C-A!” leaving Cubs manager Craig Counsell puzzled.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Counsell thought. “How do they know who he is?”
The fans could spot an original: A kid who held out rooting for his father’s favorite team, only to end up playing for that team himself.
“I did it out of spite,” Crow-Armstrong said, laughing. “The Cubs have always been in my blood.”
The Athletic’s Sahadev Sharma and Will Sammon contributed to this story.
(Photo: Matt Dirksen / Chicago Cubs via Getty Images)
