The best defender in baseball? (Almost) the best offensive player? It's the same guy

There’s no shortage of praise that can be heaped upon Pete Crow-Armstrong's stunning season.

He became one of the very few players in baseball history to post a 40/40 year, broke Statcast-era defensive records, challenged the all-time Cubs single-season records for Wins Above Replacement (WAR) and – we assume – soon enough will become one of the rare few to win an MVP award unanimously.

We could go on like this endlessly. The Cubs television broadcast, as shown on Thursday against Miami, basically does go on about it endlessly – correctly so. That’s a whole lot of things to be the best in baseball at.

It is, objectively, one of the finest all-around years on record, and that’s why WAR has it as one of the top 35 position player years ever. Perhaps that's celebration enough. It’s objectively a historically good season, no matter how you slice it.

But there’s more to it, too, and it’s not about overall value. It’s about the shape of it. It’s about the success on both sides of the ball.

Consider this: Crow-Armstrong is the best defensive player in baseball this season, by a small margin over Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. and Detroit catcher Dillon Dingler. (This is by FanGraphs’ “defensive runs,” a major component of WAR, which takes Statcast data and applies the necessary positional adjustment to put every position on the same scale. Crow-Armstrong’s defense is worth +24 runs.)

No surprise there. But consider this, too. Crow-Armstrong finished the season a close second for the title of the best offensive player in baseball this season as well, just a couple of runs behind Yordan Alvarez. While Alvarez’s bat is superior, we’re talking about offense here, which also includes baserunning, and that’s an area where Crow-Armstrong holds a massive advantage over Alvarez. Crow-Armstrong’s offense was worth +58 runs. Alvarez's was worth +60. The closest player to either of them was Seattle's Randy Arozarena, at +42.

It’s not, then, that PCA is the best defender. It’s not that he’s either the best offensive player, or very close to it. It's that he’s both, at the same time. Baseball’s best defender is also baseball’s (essentially) most productive offensive player.

That doesn’t happen, and that’s the entire point. That has never happened.

To even be top three at both, in the same season, is enough of a rarity that prior to 2026, it had happened just five times in history.

Player seasons with top-3 value on both offense and defense

• 1991 Cal Ripken Jr. (2nd in offense // 1st in defense)

• 1954 Willie Mays (3rd in offense // 2nd in defense)

• 1948 Lou Boudreau (3rd in offense // 1st in defense)

• 1945 Snuffy Stirnweiss (3rd in offense // 1st in defense)

• 1917 Rogers Hornsby (3rd in offense // 2nd in defense)

Ripken Jr., in 1991, and Mays, in 1954, were MVP seasons that also represented two of the 50 or so greatest individual seasons in baseball history. If you want to discount war (not WAR) seasons in 1945 or 1917, or pre-integration years (the same ones), or wonder how much stock to put into 1948’s finest defensive metrics, feel free. The point is, the best defenders in the game are very, very rarely also the best hitters in the game.

Sometimes, they're not even very good hitters at all.

That’s because for the most part, truly elite defenders, those good enough to rank as “baseball’s best defender” in any given season, have gloves so great that it allows them to stick in Major League lineups without needing elite bats. The previous 123 players to finish first in the Majors in defensive value also finished, on average, 133rd in offense in those seasons.

There’s a few top-10 hitters in there, like Ripken and Mays, or Ernie Banks’ 1959, but there's also Ozzie Smith’s 1980 (266th in offensive value), Patrick Bailey’s 2024 (303rd) or Rey Ordóñez’s 1999 (345th in offense, thanks to a 64 OPS+ and one lone homer.) There's three different seasons from Mark Belanger, an all-timer with the glove who also had a career .280 slugging percentage over 18 seasons.

There’s a lot of elite shortstops and catchers who simply weren’t strong hitters, and in fact were only big leaguers at all because of their gloves.

Flip it around: The previous 123 players to finish first in the Majors in offense value also finished, on average, 142nd in defense in those seasons. Again, you get the small handful of excellent two-way years from players like Mays and Joe Morgan, but there’s also a lot of years like Alvarez this year (355th on defense), or Mark McGwire in 1998 (352nd), or Frank Thomas in 1991 (301st), or Dick Allen in 1972 (220th). Lots of big bats. A few who weren’t even allowed to wear gloves, much less adding value while doing so.

Crow-Armstrong, by finishing first (or close to it) in both, stands alone. It’s not The Best Season In Baseball History, because no amount of good defense can outweigh the offensive value added by the Bondses, Ruthes and Gehrigs of the world in their best seasons.

But no one’s done this, either. We’ve never seen the best defender in baseball also be the best offensive player in baseball. It’s never happened before. It’s fair to wonder if we’ll ever see it at all. It did, after all, take more than 150 years of baseball to even get this close.

If there's anyone who can do it, though, it might just be Crow-Armstrong. Don't forget: through his first 50 games of his year, he was hitting a mere .225/.302/.357 with five homers. Nearly one-third of his great season wasn't actually that good, at least on one side of the ball. He still landed where he did. There may, somehow, yet be more in there.