CHICAGO — Carson Kelly needed a moment to take in what he was hearing last Friday. Batting eighth in the lineup, the Chicago Cubs catcher had already hit two home runs and driven in five in what would end up as a wild 13-11 comeback win over the Arizona Diamondbacks.
He was about to step into the batter’s box in the eighth inning for his fourth at-bat when he heard it coming from the stands: “Car-son, Kel-ly. Car-son Kel-ly.”
“I had to take a step out,” Kelly told ESPN with a smile the next day. “‘Wait, is that actually what they’re saying?'”
Chants directed toward a catcher at the bottom of the order aren’t commonplace in MLB — but then again, neither is the month the Cubs catcher is having nor the production the team is getting from the bottom of the lineup.
Fast-forward a couple days and this time it was the Cubs’ No. 7 hitter, Pete Crow-Armstrong, who earned the treatment.
“P-C-A, P-C-A,” bellowed the Wrigley Field crowd during the team’s two-game sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers earlier this week. After slugging a whopping .897 against the Dodgers in the seven-game season series, the L.A. native deserved all the attention he was getting. In fact, the 7-8-9 hitters in the Cubs’ lineup are garnering as many headlines as other teams’ 1-2-3 hitters as Chicago has vaulted to the top of the run-scoring leaderboards in MLB.
To wit: Heading into their weekend series against the Philadelphia Phillies, the Cubs are averaging 6.3 runs per game. That’s nearly a full run higher than the next best team, the New York Yankees, who average 5.5 runs. The separator has been the bottom of the order, which includes Crow-Armstrong, Kelly and fellow catcher Miguel Amaya. That trio, along with newcomer Kyle Tucker, has transformed the team’s offense into the best in the league over the first month of the season.
“This team is a completely different ballclub than the one we saw in Tokyo,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “They’re playing a lot better.”
The Cubs went to Japan in mid-March hoping for the best in their two-game series against the Dodgers but instead got their worst. Their offense scored a total of four runs in two losses, looking as anemic as they had for much of last year when they missed out on the playoffs for the fifth straight (full) season. Chicago was a league-average offense in 2024, leading to a league-average type of year in the standings: 83 wins and ticket home for October.
But something clicked at the plate late in the season for two young players: Crow-Armstrong and Amaya. The former, in particular, began to show why he was taken in the first round by the New York Mets in 2020, eventually getting traded to the Cubs for Javier Baez one season later. PCA — as he’s known — is a five-tool speedster whose game is as brash as his personality, all in a good way. His OPS jumped 150 points in the second half of last season.
Meanwhile, Amaya was a once-promising prospect who got sidelined by injuries and was slow to find his form at the plate. There was chatter the Cubs were in the market to replace him in the first half of last season but then he eliminated a leg kick and suddenly found his stroke. His OPS jumped over 200 points from the first half to the second last year. The team added Kelly via free agency this winter and he has gone on to produce a 1.413 OPS in 14 games.
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