Pete Crow-Armstrong smashed two home runs Wednesday night at Wrigley Field, powering the Chicago Cubs past the Atlanta Braves 8-4 and pulling him within three stolen bases of one of baseball's rarest statistical feats. The 24-year-old outfielder is chasing a 40-homer, 40-steal season that only six players in major league history have ever completed.
The Cubs' win, recapped by ESPN, saw Crow-Armstrong add a triple and a walk to his home run outburst, though he also struck out with the bases loaded during Chicago's six-run eighth-inning cushion. The two homers moved him past Hall of Famer Billy Williams for the most home runs in a single season by a left-handed hitter in Cubs franchise history, a mark Williams set back in 1970. It also marked his seventh multi-homer game of the season and the 13th of his career, according to ESPN's recap of the contest.
According to the Chicago Tribune, Crow-Armstrong is sitting three stolen bases away from what would be just the seventh 40-40 season in MLB history, with nine games left on the Cubs' schedule to get there. The last player to do it was Shohei Ohtani, who posted a 40-40 season for the Dodgers in 2024.
The Win Keeps Chicago's Playoff Hopes Alive
Beyond the individual milestone chase, Wednesday's victory carried real postseason stakes. The Tribune reports the win kept the Cubs, now 85-68, a half-game ahead of the Philadelphia Phillies for the National League's first wild-card spot. Every game — and every extra-base hit from Crow-Armstrong — is now magnified as Chicago tries to hold off Philadelphia down the stretch.
The home run outburst also tied Crow-Armstrong with Nelson Cruz for an unusual bit of company: his sixth game this season with at least 10 total bases matched Cruz's 2019 total, a mark that had stood since 1900, per the Tribune's reporting.
A Coach Traces the Roots of the Breakout
The plate discipline fueling this run did not happen overnight. Cubs hitting coach Dustin Kelly told Marquee Sports Network that Crow-Armstrong's game was “speeding up on him a little bit” during the 2024 season, which made it harder for him to control the batter's box and the strike zone.
Kelly, a former Los Angeles Dodgers employee, said the staff responded with a mechanical tweak. “We took away the leg kick or took away the no stride that he had and added a little bit of a leg kick,” Kelly told the same outlet, describing a change meant to ground Crow-Armstrong's backside and slow his swing down.
Walk Totals Show a Different Hitter at the Plate
The results have shown up most clearly in Crow-Armstrong's willingness to take a walk. Per the Chicago Tribune's July reporting, he entered a series finale against the Tigers with 52 walks in 441 plate appearances, already exceeding his combined walk total from the previous two seasons. Since June 17 of this year, he had walked at a 22% clip, the second-highest rate in the majors behind only Juan Soto's 23.1%, and his overall walk rate had climbed 7.3 percentage points from the prior season.
He had also piled up 10 games with at least two walks, compared with just two such games across his first two-plus major-league seasons, the Tribune reported. Kelly described the shift as a selective-aggressive approach in which Crow-Armstrong hunts one pitch in one part of the strike zone rather than chasing everything. “He's been able to just bottle that up and really hunt one pitch in one part of the zone,” Kelly told the Tribune. Crow-Armstrong himself credited better bat-to-ball skills for the uptick in contact, telling the paper, “I just didn't know how to utilize bat to ball. So now we are a little bit better, that's probably why the contact is higher.”
The improved patience has paid off against left-handed pitching in particular, where Crow-Armstrong carried a .289/.411/.463 slash line with five home runs and a 142 OPS+ this season, the same Tribune report noted. It's a marked departure from the free-swinging profile that once defined his early big-league at-bats.
From Harvard-Westlake to the Verge of History
Crow-Armstrong's path to this moment has led him to the verge of history. Nine games remain in the Cubs' regular season for him to pick up the three stolen bases that would complete the 40-40 season.
