For the first time since Shohei Ohtani migrated to the National League, someone is out-WAR-ing him. FanGraphs’ live WAR leaderboard has Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong at 7.0 fWAR, 1.1 ahead of Ohtani’s 5.9 — a margin built almost entirely on defense and a plate-discipline leap that nobody in the Cubs organization saw coming.
Baseball-Reference’s independently calculated bWAR tells the same story, if slightly less dramatically: Crow-Armstrong sits at 6.2 bWAR through 103 games. Ohtani’s batting-only bWAR is 2.9, though that figure doesn’t yet include his full pitching value from 14 starts before a left knee injury shelved him on the mound since July 3.
The gap is where the interesting baseball lives.
Crow-Armstrong’s offensive profile has transformed. His walk rate has jumped from 4.5% last season to 11.7%, and his on-base percentage has climbed from .287 to .383. He is hitting .285/.385/.527 with 22 home runs and 25 stolen bases — the only player in baseball to clear both the 20-homer and 20-steal thresholds to this point in the season. Baseball-Reference credits him with 12 defensive runs saved and a .986 fielding percentage in center. FanGraphs’ Outs Above Average metric rates him at 20, the best mark in MLB.
Cubs manager Craig Counsell, via MLB.com’s Jordan Bastian, admitted he has no precedent for the speed of the improvement: “The rate at which it’s improved and how fast it’s improved, I don’t have any comparisons to it. I don’t have a great explanation for it. I think it’s just a great athlete coming into his own as a great player.”
Ohtani’s case is more complicated. His .917 OPS and 22 home runs through 95 games would be a career year for nearly anyone else. For him, it’s his lowest offensive output since 2022, when Aaron Judge’s 62-homer season pushed Ohtani to a second-place MVP finish. On the mound, Ohtani posted a 1.79 ERA across 85⅔ innings before the knee issue paused his pitching program. He threw a 30-pitch bullpen session in mid-July, but Dodgers manager Dave Roberts has not committed to a return date. With Los Angeles holding a 65-38 record and an 11½-game division lead, the club can afford patience.
That patience has a cost. If Ohtani does not pitch again in the regular season, his two-way value proposition narrows to elite-hitter-only — and elite-hitter-only is exactly the territory where Crow-Armstrong’s defensive and baserunning contributions close the gap. FanGraphs’ fWAR formula weights defense more aggressively than Baseball-Reference’s bWAR, which helps explain why Crow-Armstrong’s fWAR (7.0) runs higher than his bWAR (6.2) while Ohtani’s relationship between the two metrics is more complex given his split between hitting and pitching.
The MVP race is not settled. Ohtani has won four of the last five MVP awards, all unanimously. He is on pace for 35 home runs and could still add pitching innings in September. Crow-Armstrong is tracking toward 33 homers and 40 steals — a 30-40 season paired with Gold Glove-caliber defense in center field would be difficult for voters to dismiss, particularly if Ohtani’s knee limits his mound workload down the stretch.
For now, the leaderboard says what it says. The kid who hit .237 with a .286 OBP last year is out-producing the best player in the world by a full win, and the defensive metrics responsible for that margin are not small-sample noise — they’re tracking nearly 900 innings of center field play.
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