Pete Crow-Armstrong is the best defensive center fielder in baseball. As recently as last season, there was at least a modicum of debate about that—Ceddanne Rafaela of the Red Sox won the prestigious Fielding Bible Award for center field, and might even have deserved it. Now, though, Crow-Armstrong is leaving even Rafaela behind, and doing things in outfield defense that are barely even possible.
On plays Statcast rates as 2 Stars or higher on its difficulty scale (i.e., plays where the chance of the ball being caught was under 90% but higher than 0%, based on the model’s estimates using fielder location data and the hang time of the batted ball), Crow-Armstrong is 9-for-12 so far. That’s a sensational 75% success rate, close to the 77.5% rate he put up on such plays last year. No other player was higher than 73.5% last season, so if he keeps this up, he’s got a good chance to pace the league in that regard again.
For one thing, though, that underrates him. Crow-Armstrong has one actual missed opportunity to make a catch this season. You probably remember it. In the Angels series in the first week of the campaign, Crow-Armstrong misplayed a sinking liner by Jeimer Candelario into a double. At worst, he should have stopped it and held Candelario to a single, but the ball was catchable. That was a mistake; even the best of us make one. Here’s one of the other two balls rated as catchable (although the Catch Probability was just 5%) by Statcast.
UHY2YTlfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmxCWlhRRUVCUWNBV1ZaVVVRQUhVRk5mQUFNRUJRSUFCVkVNQlFZQkNRUlFCZ1ZW.mp4
The model does try to account for the presence of the outfield wall, which is why the Catch Probability on this one was so low, but let’s be real: the chance of making that catch is 0.0%, for anyone. Crow-Armstrong got a good jump and a fine read, but if he’d kept running fast enough to catch that ball, he’d have dislodged his shoulder (and perhaps an internal organ or two) in the subsequent collision with the wall. It’s fine; other players are also having 5% plays counted against them when the real chance was none. But it’s important to me that you know about this dynamic in defensive metrics.
Here’s the other play the system says he had a 5% chance to make, but missed.
R0JyUVlfWGw0TUFRPT1fQkFGUlZWVUJVUVVBQ1ZvRFh3QUhWUU5YQUZrR1ZBY0FBMUlCQVZJR0FRWlFVZ29B.mp4
Once again, Crow-Armstrong slows—even stops—shy of the wall to play this ball. It looks less makeable than it might have looked if he’d been chasing down a would-be walkoff hit with two outs; maybe there’s a universe in which a player never breaks stride, gets the right footing as they plant their foot in the wall (no time to flatten the angle of body to wall and glide up unassisted) and snares this ball, but it would be the catch of the century. It’d also risk a broken wrist, or ribs. The real catch probability (lower-case letters, since my model is not official) on this is 0.001%.
Meanwhile, on several plays since the start of 2025, Crow-Armstrong has seemed to do the scarcely possible. He runs underneath high flies very well, but lots of fast players can do that. Byron Buxton, of the Twins, is excellent at using his speed to make up for slow breaks and at adjusting his body when needed to make a tough catch. Crow-Armstrong, though, takes away a stunning number of singles and doubles on line drives, by breaking exceptionally quickly and accelerating both faster and more relentlessly than any other outfielder in pursuit of a ball daring to seek purchase on the outfield grass. It’s not the 120-foot runs on high drives that make Crow-Armstrong extraordinary; it’s the plays like this one.
NHlLcTZfWGw0TUFRPT1fVlFGV0JRVlhBd01BQUZKV1ZnQUhCUUpTQUFNQ1ZBQUFBVlVBQ0FkVUExQlJDRlFF (1).mp4
Statcast’s Outfield Jump leaderboard tells a fascinating story about Crow-Armstrong’s excellence. It grades players on the amount of ground they cover (in any direction) in the first 1.5 seconds after contact (Reaction); and in the next 1.5 seconds (Burst); and on the ground they gain or lose, relative to average fielders, via the efficiency of their routes to the ball (Route). It gives each of these in feet above average, and then gives a total—both relative to average, and raw.
This season, Crow-Armstrong sits atop that Jump leaderboard. He gains 5.2 feet of ground across the three components, relative to the average outfielder, with a good (+1.8 feet) initial reaction but an otherworldly (+3.2 feet) burst in that secondary moment of pursuit. He’s also more efficient in his routes than the average outfielder—and, again, here we risk underrating him. The more a player moves in that 3-second window, the more likely they are to waste at least a little bit of that movement. That’s not a new idea, or even a bad thing; it’s part of the conscious tradeoff outfielders make all the time. However, Crow-Armstrong doesn’t lose efficiency to his remarkably quick response on fly balls. He shoots himself at the ball’s landing spot like he’s a missile-defense system, and he never misses.
That 5.2 feet of ground covered relative to the average is impressive, but barely beats out Chandler Simpson and Jacob Young (the dots breaking the scale, off the right and lower edges of the graph above, respectively, with their incredibly fast but noisy starts after balls) to top the leaderboard. The raw number of territory Crow-Armstrong covers in that 3-second window, though, is the more astonishing one: 40.1 feet. That’s not a number anyone else in the league is terribly close to. Second on the list is Simpson, who plays left field instead of center and only covers 38.6 feet. In fact, going back to the dawn of this tracking of outfielders in 2016, no one has covered 40 feet in those 3 seconds over a full season, or even done so in a partial campaign as an overzealous rookie. Crow-Armstrong is stretching the boundaries of the possible.
He’s a seaplane, in this way, flying just above a rising tide. In 2016, the median figure for ground covered in that window was 32.5 feet, and it stayed fairly flat through 2021 (32.6 feet). Since then, though, teams have accelerated their move toward younger, faster, better-instructed outfielders. The median ground covered in those 3 seconds over the last four seasons (and so far this year) go like this:
- 2022: 33.0 ft.
- 2023: 33.0
- 2024: 33.4
- 2025: 33.4
- 2026: 34.1
The sample for this year is still small, and the number is likely to come down a bit. Even so, the trend is clear. It’s harder than ever to be 5 feet better at chasing after a fly ball than your peers in the big leagues, because those peers are getting better by the minute. Last summer, Isaac Collins of the Brewers became an Outfield Jump star by taking the practice of timing a hop to put oneself in the air when a pitch passed through the hitting zone from the infield dirt to his place in the outfield. A handful of players around the league now emulate Collins, making the outfield a more explosive, reactive area of the field than it was even a few years ago. To be a plus center fielder, you have to be able to cover at least 12 yards in 3 seconds, and (of course) you have to move in the right direction to flag down the ball every time.
Crow-Armstrong is breaking the scale. He might not keep his average ground covered over 40 feet all season, and even if he does, someone else might come along and do it soon, too. The tide is rising. Somehow, though, even at a moment when outfield defense is getting much better, Crow-Armstrong is widening the gap between himself and the rest of the group. He catches everything; he catches some things that don’t even register at remotely catchable. He’s also brilliant at playing balls off the wall, charging ground-ball singles, and setting up under fly balls to get off the best possible throw. He can change a game with his defense in center field in a way no other player in the league can, because he’s taken his game to a new level over the last year. It’s not a matter of raw talent, though he’s always had the tools he needed out there. It’s about the way he’s shaved all the rough edges off his game, until he stands well clear of a pack that leaves much less room for clearance than it used to.
