As much as Pete Crow-Armstrong does on a major league field, he doesn’t pitch.
The Cubs’ star center fielder woke up Monday baseball’s leader in bWAR (4.0) and ranked third in the sport in fWAR (3.5), a reflection of his all-around excellence as a defender and a hitter.
His bat has caught fire in the last couple weeks, and after three at-bats Monday night – he smacked a second leadoff homer in three days in his first – he was hitting .444 with seven long balls and 14 extra-base hits since May 30, the night he silenced Cardinals fans with a 444-foot homer into their section of shirtless hecklers.
And then there’s that dazzling center-field defense, which has been so good so often that even his diving, highlight-reel catches are becoming commonplace.
“He’s been great defensively since he showed up in the big leagues, but his consistency has been on another level this year,” second baseman Nico Hoerner told the Sun-Times on Saturday. “It’s a great thing when you can have a player who’s already great at something still find ways to improve. He’s been a huge asset for us.”
Crow-Armstrong, though, won’t be able to drag the Cubs back to the top of the standings on his own, as he admitted last week.
And even if his bat at the top of the order ignites the team’s lineup, that won’t be enough to get them back to where they were before an ugly 8-22 stretch that dropped them from the top of the NL Central to .500.
No, to get back to looking like a championship contender, the Cubs need every phase to click at the same time.
“How we win games, night to night, is something that the whole roster carries,” manager Craig Counsell said before Monday’s game. “During those [two 10-game winning] streaks [earlier in the season, I said,] multiple times, ‘The number of guys on the roster contributing is what’s causing this.’ And that’s what you need to do.
“It’s not going to be one or the other. One or the other won’t be good enough.”
The Cubs have the best defense in baseball, and they were happy about a better-looking few days on their recent road trip out West, when they strung three wins together for the first time since completing their second 10-game win streak of the season.
A team that still came into Monday last in baseball with a .349 slugging percentage since May 9 managed to slug .543 in those three consecutive victories, with a pair of three-homer games sandwiched around Michael Busch’s splash hit into McCovey Cove.
But it was only three days.
“A couple guys had some games they needed to have,” Counsell said. “But that doesn’t guarantee us anything for today, and that doesn’t guarantee that some of these guys that have been swinging it well keep swinging it well.”
Consistency is obviously the name of the game as the Cubs try to chase down the division-leading Brewers, who they’ll meet at the end of the month. Will they be firing on all cylinders again by then?
In addition to getting the bats hot, they’ll need to see their pitching shake off a rough month, too. Cubs hurlers came into Monday with a 4.81 ERA since May 9, the sixth highest in baseball during that span. They still lead the sport in home runs allowed, with 104 served up coming into Monday.
Ben Brown has been great, Javier Assad hasn’t allowed a run since coming back from the minors, and there were other bright spots, too, on the most recent trip.
But positive signs here and there won’t be good enough, either.
“We’ve just got to click and play good baseball and do it consistently,” third baseman Alex Bregman said before leaving San Francisco on Sunday. “All phases of the game were better in the last three days. Hopefully, we’ll continue to build off that.”