Whicker: Dealing Crow-Armstrong to Cubs may go down as Mets’ biggest trade blunder
Chicago Cubs centre fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong belted five home runs in two games on the weekend.
August 31, 2026
By Mark Whicker
Canadian Baseball Network
Some trades, and their consequences, don’t just grow. They metastasize. Thirteen months after the Mets drafted a L.A. high school outfielder named Pete Crow-Armstrong in the first round, they succumbed to a particularly bad strain of pennant fever. They lusted for Javier Baez, the many-faceted star of the Cubs in the late 2010s.
Except this was 2021. The Mets were leading the National League East by four games at the time, but interim general manager Zack Scott, supported by club president Sandy Alderson, wanted more.
So Scott called the Cubs, who had Tom Myers, a scout who had done a lot of pre-draft work on Crow-Armstrong. Myers told the Cubs who to ask for, and Baez went east and Crow-Armstrong went to the midwest. If you’ve noticed, his journey has taken a sharp turn northward.
In fact, Crow-Armstrong and Houston’s Yordan Alvarez might fulfill an amazing double. Both are clear favorites for the Most Valuable Player awards. And both were once the property of the two richest clubs in baseball, the ones whose payrolls supposedly create such a competitive imbalance that we might experience a lockout to rectify it. The Dodgers dealt Alvarez, a prospect at the time, to Houston for veteran, and expendable, reliever Josh Fields. It just proves that big money doesn’t always prevent a brain cramp, and that you play the game with bats and gloves, not portfolios.
The trade didn’t take long to backfire. The Mets made the deal on July 30 and had a 9-19 August, eventually going 22-37 and missing the playoffs. It wasn’t Baez’s fault, since he hit .299 with nine home runs, but then he signed a rich free agent deal with Detroit.
Crow-Armstrong was in Wrigley Field by 2023, although he went 0-for-13, and his centre-field defense earned him 123 games in 2024. Last year he solidified his turf and slammed 31 home runs. This past weekend he hit five in two games for the Cubs against Cincinnati. As the Cubs headed into a four-game home series with Milwaukee Monday night, Crow-Armstrong led the league in slugging and OPS and continued to expand the borders of centre field. He is 24 years old, hangs out with Bears’ quarterback Caleb Williams, and is known by two acronyms whenever he pokes his head into public: PCA and MVP.
Scott, who left the Mets after that season, has been up front about the trade, saying it was an evaluation mistake. He said he had learned from Dave Dombrowski that he should identify a couple of minor league keepers and then use everyone else in the trade market, if needed, and the Mets were unanimous that catcher Francisco Alvarez was their best kid. Maybe so, because catchers are rare, but Crow-Armstrong was, after all, their first-round pick, a Vanderbilt commit who had grown up with future major leaguers at Harvard-Westlake High.
And he had barely played, since he tore his labrum during a slide in the Florida State League. Now the trade seems destined to reach the depths of Boston’s dismissal of Jeff Bagwell, in exchange for reliever Larry Anderson, or Atlanta’s heist of John Smoltz in exchange for starting pitcher Doyle Alexander.
Still, no one anticipated how PCA’s bat would go nuclear. He did hit 31 home runs in 2025 but only six of them came after July 10, and he receded from a .273 average on Aug. 1 to .247 at the end. Then he was hitting .214 with a .572 OPS after 22 games this year.
Somewhere in there, new Cub third baseman Alex Bregman gave him a swing thought that might have changed PCA’s history, along with the Cubs’. He told the kid to go to the plate with one pitch in mind, block out everything else, and keep the game plan regardless of the count. Crow-Armstrong began finding the bleachers, and he also began walking, which roughly coincided with his move to the leadoff spot on May 13. He has 71 walks this year after he had 29 in 2025.
All of that came to spectacular fruition in June, when the Ferris Buellers of the world don’t have to take days off. Crow-Armstrong hit .381 in June with a 1.249 OPS and a .781 slug percentage, and 40 hits in 26 games. It literally ranked with the best Junes in baseball history, and the Cubs went 16-10 and have been comfortably above the playoff line ever since.
Beyond all the numbers, Crow-Armstrong could have given the Mets a priceless shot of charisma. He is an unfiltered All-Star who berates himself when things go wrong and celebrates mightily when they don’t, and his comments are raw and bleepable. Of his early struggles, he said, “I had to come up here and suck.” But when a White Sox fan indeed reminded Crow-Armstrong that he “sucked,” he loudly suggested that she did the same and got a little too specific about what and how. That prompted one of his few apologies. “I’m sure I come off as a douche sometimes,” he told Chicago Magazine.
He also put off some local friends when he praised Cubs’ fans for being into the game and not like Dodgers’ fans “who just show up to take pictures.”
But that’s what happens when you’re an only child and your parents “were cool. They allowed me to be myself.”
PCA’s mom is Ashley Crow, who was the mother in the movie “Little Big League,” in which a 12-year-olld inherits the Minnesota Twins from his grandfather and then nearly manages them to the pennant. A catch by Ken Griffey Jr. stopped them short.
Matthew John Armstrong is also an actor, playing in the TV hit “Heroes.” He grew up in Napervile, Ill., so the fence in their impromptu backyard ballpark was covered with ivy. Father and son were nearly in tears when they heard about the trade.
The parents weren’t famous enough for paparazzi, and it seemed a fairly normal existence. For one thing, they were home a lot. But there were perks. Hayden Panettiere, the 36-year-old actor who also starred in “Heroes” and passed away in August, was one of PCA’s baby-sitters.
He always had a comparison to meet. His Harvard-Westake shortstop was Drew Bowser, who is now in the Cubs’ system, and whose mother Yvette is a Hollywood producer and is the first Black woman to develop her own network sitcom (Living Single). Then there was outfielder R.J. Schreck, who was ahead of Crow-Armstrong and stayed ahead of him even though he didn’t have the same tools.
“I always was chasing him,” PCA said, “and it used to piss me off to no end.”
Crow-Armstrong hasn’t signed long-term yet and has pointed out that playing for the minimum of $820,000 isn’t exactly a burden. But a big deal is coming. One never knows, but it’s doubtful that Crow-Armstrong will wear the dollar signs like anvils. “He wasn’t necessarily interested in acting,” said Jared Halpert, his high school coach, “But you’re a performer, right? You’re in an arena and people are watching you. You’re performing. He has a lot of fun with that.”
Given heath, calls for Crow-Armstrong’s encores will resound for years, everywhere short of Broadway. And fans will serenade their general managers with familiar advice. Know your system better than anyone else does.