The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox.Good morning! Don’t be intimidated by the greatest of all time today. Inside:
Statistically Speaking: Has Ohtani finally met his MVP match?Shohei Ohtani’s run of three straight MVPs is probably about to end at the hands of some guy who plays a mere one position and was carrying a .572 OPS three weeks into the season. If it happens, Pete Crow-Armstrong will have earned it.The Cubs center fielder is now likelier than not to win the award Ohtani won going away in 2024 and 2025. (Ohtani also won the AL MVP in 2023, his last year with the Angels.) Crow-Armstrong is the public’s favorite (per BetMGM), with an implied chance north of 60 percent.The numbers say PCA has indeed been the most valuable. The 24-year-old has been worth 8.3 WAR so far, per FanGraphs. That almost doubles up any other NL hitter and is well clear of Ohtani, who’s derived 4 WAR as a hitter and another 3 as a pitcher. PCA has dramatically improved both his walk rate and his performance against lefties. Mix those things with his superb defense, power and base-running, and you get a season for the ages.Ohtani is not slouching. At the plate, he has gone from superhuman to, well, still superhuman but slightly less so this season (a 152 wRC+ entering the weekend, compared to 172 last year). On the mound, he’s been dominant, but in just 85 innings.In many years, that would get Ohtani the MVP. It’s just that PCA is covering so many bases, literally and figuratively. Do you like traditional benchmarks? Neat; PCA reached the 30/30 mark last week. Do you like detailed defensive stats? Very good; he’s converted 23 outs above average so far, giving him a decent shot at the most productive defensive season since at least 2016. Do you yearn for the clutch gene? Crow-Armstrong has been even better in big moments, with one of the best lines in baseball in high-leverage plate appearances. Durability counts, too. Crow-Armstrong has played in every single Cubs game. He’s fielded his demanding position for nearly 1,100 innings, or more than 1,000 more than Ohtani has worn a glove.It just feels like one of those special years. Jon Greenberg likens it to another Chicago sports season, the one in which Derrick Rose won NBA MVP. There’s also just a certain magic to what PCA is doing, leading a team that’s had more or less an entire big-league pitching staff on the injured list for much of the season.When Crow-Armstrong was off to a strong start last year, I talked with our Eno Sarris about the potential for him to develop into a Hall of Fame player. It felt fanciful, but I’d made a silly bet on an expensive dinner with a friend that he’d get into Cooperstown someday. Eno was receptive but careful. But now PCA looks like a solid bet to get to 40 WAR by his age-30 season, and that would give him a shot.
