What looked to be a dream season for Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong has started going sideways.
Crow-Armstrong not only made his first All-Star team this season, but he was a top contender for Most Valuable Player honors in the National League. But since the start of August, he’s been mired in an inexplicable, horrific slump.
Granted, it’s only been 10 games. But Crow-Armstrong is 3-for-37 with two walks and a double, striking out 14 times. That’s an OPS of .213, bringing his season mark down to .815 and putting him at long odds to get back in the MVP race.
Crow-Armstrong’s slump has also coincided with the evaporation of the Cubs’ division title hopes, as the Milwaukee Brewers, riding an 11-game winning streak entering Wednesday, have taken a 7 1/2-game lead in the National League Central.
On Tuesday, Crow-Armstrong talked about his slump with The Athletic’s Sadahev Sharma, and he couldn’t pin down much in the way of a concrete cause for his lack of production.
“Nothing is really wrong,” Crow-Armstrong told Sharma. “I just suck at hitting baseballs sometimes right now. That’s OK. It doesn’t feel OK when I’m on the field and want to help my team win. You’d like to be the kick-starter or game-changer.”
Sharma also presented data that suggested that rather than chasing outside the strike zone too much, which is a staple of his game anyway, Crow-Armstrong is actually missing good pitches to hit when they come.
“That’s kind of what he’s going through right now,” hitting coach Dustin Kelly said, per Sharma. “There’s not a ton of stuff with the swing that’s different; the tempo looks really good. Sometimes you go through spells where you just don’t get it on the barrel like you want to and it ends up on the ground.”
So perhaps this is just baseball, and it’s still a short enough slump that Crow-Armstrong can turn things around with a good week or two. But he could have hardly picked a worse time to stop producing, because no one seems to be able to pick up the slack.
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