Pete Crow-Armstrong

The Cubs made an effort to lock up center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong during Spring Training. At the time, an MLB.com report indicated that Chicago made an offer that could have maxed out around $75MM had all the option years been exercised — though the actual guarantee would have checked in lower than that.

Last week, Jon Heyman of The New York Post reported that the Cubs offered a guarantee in the $60-70MM range before the season started. Crow-Armstrong obviously wasn’t persuaded by that, and his asking price has surely only increased after a monster start to the year. Most extensions are concentrated during Spring Training or within the opening two to three weeks of the regular season. Players often prefer to table discussions to avoid potential distractions during the summer months.

Heyman nevertheless wrote last week that the Cubs were making “in-season overtures” to Crow-Armstrong’s camp. He indicated the team was willing to up its offer from the spring. President of baseball operations Jed Hoyer predictably didn’t comment on the team’s new price range but told Patrick Mooney of The Athletic on Tuesday that the front office is willing to keep negotiations going. “Not talking during the season, to me, that’s a player-focused thing,” Hoyer told Mooney. “I’m not playing. I’ve got time to negotiate if they want.”

While Hoyer didn’t go into detail about the current state of conversations, he spoke about the reporting from April. Hoyer stated that the sides “hadn’t talked in a couple weeks when (word of the offer) leaked out” and added that “the number that came out about that wasn’t right.” MLB.com had initially reported that the offer was in the $75MM range before correcting that that number represented the approximate maximum value, including what was presumably at least one club option year.

Crow-Armstrong is playing at a level that’d put him in the MVP conversation if he keeps it up all year. He took a .280/.310/.565 slash line across 229 plate appearances into tonight’s game. He has swiped 14 bases in 17 attempts while already establishing a new career high with 14 home runs. He’s added 13 doubles and three triples and is tied for fourth in MLB (behind Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani and teammate Seiya Suzuki) with 30 extra-base hits.

That would play at any position. It’s particularly remarkable from a player whose primary asset is his glove. Crow-Armstrong has been viewed as an elite defensive center fielder throughout his professional career. His early MLB results have supported that evaluation. The 23-year-old leads all outfielders with nine Outs Above Average, according to Statcast. He tied for sixth by that metric during his 2024 rookie campaign.

There’s probably still some trepidation about Crow-Armstrong’s offensive approach. He’s among the most aggressive hitters in MLB. He has walked in fewer than 4% of his plate appearances. This season’s success has come despite a middling .310 on-base percentage. The approach was certainly an issue during his debut campaign, as he hit .237/.286/.384 last year.

Crow-Armstrong entered this season with 170 days of major league service, putting him two days shy of one full service year. He’s a lock to qualify for early arbitration as a Super Two player at the end of the ’26 season. He will not reach free agency for another five years after this one, however. If the sides were to negotiate a deal that goes into effect next year, he’d be in the 1-2 year service class.

As Front Office subscribers can see with MLBTR’s Contract Tracker, Jackson Merrill established a new standard for players in that bracket with this spring’s $135MM deal. Merrill probably took something of a hometown discount, but he also had a higher established offensive baseline than Crow-Armstrong does. Merrill hit 24 homers with a .292/.326/.500 slash over a full season as a 21-year-old rookie. He’s also a plus center fielder, albeit not quite the caliber of defender that Crow-Armstrong is. Merrill is an aggressive hitter in his own right, but he’s had sustained offensive success essentially from the moment he reached the big leagues.

Though Crow-Armstrong may have a comparable or even slightly higher ceiling, he’s not as established. During Spring Training, the Cubs seemingly valued him in the next tier of young hitters. An offer in the $60-70MM range would have aligned with recent deals for Lawrence Butler and Ezequiel Tovar. Crow-Armstrong has clearly played himself above that group within the past couple months, but there’s a broad range between them and Merrill.

TODAY: The Cubs and Crow-Armstrong have ceased negotiations for now, the Athletic’s Patrick Mooney writes. As per Mooney’s framing, the talks seemed somewhat exploratory in nature, and perhaps more to “lay some groundwork for the future” rather than to complete an extension immediately. There was also some conflict with Feinsand’s report in terms of the $75MM ceiling of the possible extension, as Mooney writes that “team and league sources characterized the outline of that report…as inaccurate.”

APRIL 12: The Cubs recently reached out to center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong‘s camp with an extension offer, according to a report from MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand. Feinsand relays that the deal would’ve maxed out in the $75MM range if all option years involved in the deal had been exercised, though it would not have reached that figure in terms of total guarantee. The exact structure of the offer is not known and, while Feinsand writes that the sides did not work out a deal, it’s unclear whether talks between the two sides have ended for the time being or could continue going forward.

That Chicago would have interest in extending Crow-Armstrong’s stay in Chicago beyond his years of control is hardly surprising. The longtime top prospect came over from the Mets in the Javier Baez trade at the 2021 trade deadline, and he flew through the minor leagues after arriving in Chicago to make his big league debut late in the 2023 season. Crow-Armstrong’s offense has not been anything special during his time in the majors so far, with a 79 wRC+ overall and an 87 wRC+ in 123 games last year, but he’s more than made up for that lackluster performance at the plate with phenomenal work in the field and on the bases. Crow-Armstrong went an excellent 27-for-30 on the basepaths last year, including 22 straight steals without being caught.

In the field, meanwhile, his +14 Outs Above Average and +11 Defensive Runs Saved were the fifth- and seventh-best figures among all outfielders, while his +16 Fielding Run Value was surpassed among fielders at all positions by only Giants catcher Patrick Bailey. Those defensive accolades become even more impressive when considering that Crow-Armstrong played just 112 games in center field, meaning he put up those huge numbers despite getting less than three-quarters of a full season’s worth of reps. Overall, that defensive and baserunning ability was good for 2.7 fWAR last year despite him being 13% below league average as a hitter.

The fact that Crow-Armstrong has flashed a three-win floor when prorated out over a full season has to be enticing to the Cubs even before considering his solid work on offense in the second half last year, when he slashed .260/.309/.442 with a 108 wRC+ and nine homers over the season’s final three months. If the 23-year-old were ever able to reach that sort of offensive production on a consistent basis, he’d likely blossom into the sort of perennial All-Star Chicago is surely hoping for. That all makes trying to extend Crow-Armstrong, as many other clubs have done with youngsters like Lawrence Butler and Ezequiel Tovar, a sensible goal for the organization.

With that being said, offering Crow-Armstrong a hefty contract under the expectation that he will fulfill that offensive ceiling would be very risky. He certainly wouldn’t be the first extremely talented hitter with five-tool potential to fail to reach that ceiling in the big leagues, and Billy Hamilton‘s career serves as a reminder of the fact that a player can’t expect to find success purely off elite defensive and baserunning even if they play a position as defensively important as center field. That surely contributed to a recent poll of MLBTR readers winding up split nearly down the middle on whether or not the Cubs should pursue an extension with the youngster, with just under 52% of respondents voting no.

Chicago’s solution for the wide gap between Crow-Armstrong’s current offensive abilities and his demonstrated potential seems to have been to err on the side of caution. An extension that guarantees Crow-Armstrong significantly less than $75MM would fall below the standard set by many other recent early-career extensions including the aforementioned Butler and Tovar deals as well as deals signed by players like Jackson Chourio and Kristian Campbell just after or before their big league debuts. It’s hard to properly evaluate the deal the Cubs offered Crow-Armstrong without knowing more about the structure; after all, even the deal between Detroit and infielder Colt Keith maxes out in a similar range ($82MM) as the one reported for Crow-Armstrong despite guaranteeing him just $28.6425MM.

Given that even mediocre hitters with the sort of elite defense that Crow-Armstrong possesses like Harrison Bader and Kevin Kiermaier have been paid handsomely in free agency with one-year deals that often fall into the $10MM range, it makes sense that Crow-Armstrong would likely require a healthier guarantee than the one Keith received from the Tigers in order to sign on the dotted line. Evidently, the offer the Cubs presented his camp with did not pass muster, though with the youngster not presently set to hit free agency until after the 2030 season there’s still plenty of time for the two sides to work out a deal that extends his stay in Chicago past those initial years of team control.