Pete Crow-Armstrong was 9 when his father, Matt, threw down the gauntlet. Not about school. Not about sports. About the Chicago Cubs. Matt Armstrong grew up a Cubs fan in Naperville, Illinois.
Both he and his wife, Ashley Crow, were actors, raising Pete, their only child, in Southern California. Armstrong sensed that the Cubs, after hiring Theo Epstein as president of baseball operations and Jed Hoyer as general manager, soon would be on the rise.
“I said to Pete, they’re bad now, but they’re going to be good eventually,” Armstrong recalled. “And if you’re not on board by then, you’re not on the bandwagon, dude. You have to suffer in order to join.”
Armstrong said Pete originally rooted for the Boston Red Sox, growing enamored with the team during its run to the 2004 World Series title. Just 2 1/2 at the time, Pete would pluralize Johnny Damon’s last name, calling him, “Johnny Damons.”
For a time, Pete was a fan of the Cubs’ biggest rival, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Chicago Bears’ biggest NFL rival, the Green Bay Packers. “I’m convinced there was some part of him that was, I won’t say sadistic, but he wanted to screw with me as much as possible,” Armstrong said. “He was trolling me at a very young age.”
Little did either of them know how the story would turn out. Crow-Armstrong, 23, is now one of the breakout stars of the 2025 season, playing electrifying defense in center field, using his dynamic blend of power and speed to serve as an offensive igniter and captivating fans with his charismatic personality. And doing it all for the Chicago Cubs.
As with so many baseball stories, Crow-Armstrong’s journey could have been quite different. He was not drafted by the Cubs. The New York Mets selected him out of Harvard-Westlake High School in Los Angeles with the 19th pick of the 2020 draft.
Entering 2021, Crow-Armstrong’s first full pro season, The Athletic’s Keith Law ranked him the 94th best prospect in the game and the Mets’ fourth-best, behind catcher Francisco Alvarez, infielder Ronny Mauricio and right-hander Matt Allan.
Baseball America and MLB Pipeline rated Crow-Armstrong slightly lower, excluding him from their top 100 and the Mets’ top four. In May of that season, after playing only six games at Low-A, Crow-Armstrong had season-ending surgery to repair a torn labrum in his right shoulder.
When the Mets, leading the National League East, sought help from the Cubs at the trade deadline, Crow-Armstrong was rehabilitating at their spring-training site in Port St. Lucie, Florida.
“We were really fortunate,” Hoyer said. “If he’s playing, we’re never getting him. His defensive numbers would have been great, and they probably would have said no.” The Mets wanted infielder Javier Báez, a potential free agent. Crow-Armstrong was not the Cubs’ initial target. Early in the negotiations, Hoyer kept asking for Allan, who had recently undergone Tommy John surgery.
The Mets, viewing Allan as a future top-of-the-rotation starter, responded that he was untouchable. Mark Vientos, then a corner infielder and outfielder in Triple-A, was another player the Mets and Cubs discussed. Zack Scott, the Mets’ acting general manager, who had worked for the Boston Red Sox from 2004 to 2020, carried his old team’s preferences to his new one.
Armstrong is in his ninth year serving as the director of theater arts and an English teacher for high school students at the Sierra Canyon School in Los Angeles. Every year, the school hosts Peak Week, when faculty can conduct a seminar on anything that interests them. Matt teaches a baseball statistics class.
“We dove into advanced metrics while watching entire games or moments in games, compared players from different eras using old-school stats vs. new metrics,” Armstrong said. “It was pretty cool for them to see while Johan Santana wasn’t Koufax, he wasn’t that far off, either.
We watched ‘Moneyball,’ too.” The Cubs, though, are never far from Armstrong’s heart. In 2016, he attended Game 4 of the World Series at Wrigley Field. Friends invited him to attend Games 6 and 7 in Cleveland as well, but those were weekday games. Matt had just started teaching at Sierra Canyon and didn’t want to miss work
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