Yesterday afternoon, the Rushing Baseball account on X (good follow), pointed out something very extreme about Alex Bregman so far this year: Despite being on the receiving end of 147 pitches so far, the Cubs third baseman has swung at just TWO pitches outside of the strikezone.
Statcast, who may calculate this a little differently, has him with an O-swing rate* of just 6.3%.
*O-swing rate is a stat that measures the percentage of swings a batter takes on pitches that fall outside of the strike zone.
As I hope you could have guessed, that is BY FAR the best mark in baseball. The next closest player, Taylor Ward, has an 11.3% O-swing rate. And league average, get ready for a laugh, is 30.4%. Indeed, the single best mark in the Statcast era belongs to the famously patient Juan Soto, who, in 2021, posted an 11.5% O-swing rate for the season. So, yeah, what Bregman has been doing so far this year is the most extreme of the extreme. He is making VERY good choices.
And when you pair that with all of the truly fantastic batted ball and swing data we explored just the other day, there are some very good reasons to be extra optimistic about what kind of offensive season he has ahead of him.
But for every extreme in one direction, there is one in the other. And for the Cubs, that comes in the form of Pete Crow-Armstrong.
Now, before I actually share this data with you, I do want to clear up one pervasive, fundamental misunderstanding about Pete Crow-Armstrong.
From his haters in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and the South Side of Chicago to some well-meaning Cubs fans, there is a belief that PCA is some sort of strikeout machine. But that’s just not the case. In 2024, as a 22-year-old rookie, PCA struck out just 23.9% of the time. In 2025, he struck out an almost identical 24.0% of the time. And although it’s higher this season, 27.6%, we’re talking about just 29 plate appearances. And that’s still not THAT crazy of a K-rate.
Now, with that said, there is something he does do to the extreme (in a bad way), and that’s chase pitches out of the zone. Indeed, that’s the entire point of this half of the post – to demonstrate that he’s almost at the other end of the spectrum, entirely, from Alex Bregman. But just because you swing at a lot of “balls” does not mean you strike out a lot. Just saying.
Anyway, yeah, this is not pretty. In 2024, PCA offered at 41.3% of pitches out of the zone, which was the sixth-highest mark in MLB (min. 350 PA). In 2025, PCA’s chase rate increased slightly to 41.7%, which was the fourth-highest mark in MLB. And so far, this season, PCA is swinging at a ridiculous 46.0% of pitches out of the zone.
That’s the ninth highest in the league and would be roughly one of the five worst chase rates in a single season in the Statcast era if he stayed there all year.
So, yeah, that’s not great. And it’s actually even worse when you realize that only 47.8% of pitches PCA has faced this season have been in the strike zone. That’s 8th lowest in baseball. In other words, opposing teams know they don’t have to throw him strikes. And until he stops swinging at so many pitches out of the zone, that might only get worse.
Worse still, PCA’s zone swing rate is actually down this year, relative to his career. Fortunately, he swings a LOT, so that’s still MUCH better than average. But, yeah, that might just be because very few batters swing more than him at all.
There is good news, though. Multiple layers, too.
For one, PCA is actually making contact with a very strong 90.2% of pitches in the strike zone this year. Last season, that number was 84%, and it’s even worse if you zoom out to his whole career. Indeed, a 90.2% zone-contact rate would have been one of the top-30 marks in baseball last season. So in terms of where his “strikeout issues” lie, it’s not so much about a hole in his swing as it is swing decisions.
You can decide for yourself which is actually worse.
But I actually do think there’s a good path here for PCA to course correct, and he’s already halfway there.
If we’re calling pitch recognition the primary issue for PCA at the moment, then one solution would be waiting longer to actually pull the trigger. And although that’s easier said than done, it can be accomplished by players with great bat speed — the faster you swing, the longer you can wait to swing.
Pete Crow-Armstrong has always had solid bat speed, but he’s even higher than usual this year: 73.8 MPH average bat speed. For his career, that was 71.7%, which is effectively league average.
Now, funny enough, PCA was recently made aware of his increasing bat speed, but sees it as a negative (via The Athletic): “I’ve just been fighting certain things movement-wise,” Crow-Armstrong said. “Ultimately, it’s probably a result of me being late and then I gotta catch up. Naturally, I think that happens a lot.”
“I think it’s bad habits leading to that,” Crow-Armstrong said. “If I’m late on heaters, then I’m going to be swinging harder because I feel like I gotta catch up. If I was just on time and taking my normal swing, I’d probably not be swinging as hard.”
But I don’t think this really has to be one or the other. While I’m sure PCA is correct that the swing speed is more of a byproduct, I still think his physical ability to swing that fast could be an asset. Then again, hitting coach Dustin Kelly’s perspective is more useful, and he leans a little more to PCA’s point than mine:
Hitting coach Dustin Kelly says he monitors these things and has noticed that Crow-Armstrong’s bat speed is up as well. Kelly believes that it has to do with Crow-Armstrong being fresh and aggressive early in the year. But like Crow-Armstrong, he doesn’t think it will lead to better outcomes.
“We saw this last year, too,” Kelly said. “At the very beginning of the year, his bat speeds were through the roof. And then they tapered down. Actually, in his best stretch, they were a little bit lower than they were at the start.”
But there is some nuance here and it’s whether PCA is (1) being proactive about waiting longer to swing and using his elite speeds to his advantage or (2) just emergency hacking with everything he’s got.
Either way, this is all kind of beside the point. And that is that PCA needs to make better swing decisions, regardless of how hard he is swinging. And until he does, he’s just going to see more and more pitches out of the zone, exacerbating what is already almost a league-worst problem.
There is a little more to this, too. Both good and bad. In the good column, PCA’s swing length is stable, and he is posting the highest ideal attack angle of his career. On the bad side, his squared-up contact rate is WAY down, and he hasn’t hit a single line drive all season.
But again, this all goes back to the original point: PCA is simply offering at too many pitches out of the zone. So … here’s hoping Alex Bregman can tap into some of that famed leadership skillset and teach PCA the way of patience. That would be nice.
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