The MVP winners were revealed Thursday evening and, unsurprisingly, the runaway unanimous winner in the National League was Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Cubs.
Crow-Armstrong had an all-time great regular season, which is what the annual Baseball Writers’ Association of America award honors. He hit .280/.372/.570 with stellar defense, led the league in home runs (tied with Kyle Schwarber) and massively upgraded his on-base skills. Now, just a few months shy of his 25th birthday, he has an MVP to his name.
So what’s next? To answer that, we’ll look backwards.
Since integration, only eight center fielders have posted at least 8.0 WAR in a season age-25 or younger: Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Willie Davis, César Cedeño, Ken Griffey Jr., Andruw Jones, Mike Trout and PCA. The only ones to top PCA’s 9.8 were Mays, Mantle and Trout. If we went back to pre-integration, Tris Speaker and Ty Cobb were the only others who bested PCA here.
What road map will PCA’s career follow?
The Davis route
Willie Davis was an inconsistent hitter through his age-23 season but had flashed a nice power-speed combo. Sound familiar? That gaudy 8.4 WAR total in 1964, though, was driven largely by monster defensive metrics. Davis hit .294/.316/.413 (110 OPS+) with 23 doubles, seven triples, 12 home runs, 77 RBI, 91 runs and 42 steals. There’s little doubt that PCA’s 2026 season dwarfed this one overall, and Davis was far behind Mays (11.0) for the league lead in WAR.
For the rest of his career, Davis averaged 3.1 WAR per season, and though he had good years, he never reached 6.0 WAR again. The WAR figure was, again, mostly driven by defense. He had several good offensive seasons, but his only 20-homer season came in 1962 when he was 22, two years prior to his career year.
Davis’ career probably looks a lot like PCA’s apparent upside before his home run barrage in the first half of 2025. He racked up over 60 career WAR with a decent batting average, excellent defense and excellent baserunning.
With PCA reaching 30-30 last year and 40-40 this year, though, the bar has been raised.
The Jones/Cedeño route
César Cedeño followed up his 8.0 WAR season with a 7.4 season at age 22 and 5.8 at age 23. He was very good through age 29 and, in fact, the most statistically similar player through both ages 27 and 28 was Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski. Things fell apart after that. As a quick and easy way to illustrate it, Cedeño amassed 49.4 WAR through his age-29 season and only 3.6 in his final six years.
It’s easier to remember that Andruw Jones’ career unfolded in similar fashion because we witnessed it not too long ago and then discussed his Hall of Fame candidacy during his nine turns on the ballot before he finally made it in. In Jones’ 12 Braves‘ season, he racked up 368 home runs, 1,117 RBI and 61 WAR while generally being considered the best defensive center fielder in baseball. Once he left, in time for his age-31 season, Jones accrued just 1.7 WAR in his last five seasons.
Through Jones’ age-28 season, the most statistically similar players are Bryce Harper and Frank Robinson.
To compare these two to Crow-Armstrong, the argument would be that he’ll continue to look like one of the best players in baseball — even if taking steps backward from being the very best in the 2026 regular season — before falling apart once he’s around 30 years old.
Certainly possible, but given the adjustments he’s already not only been willing to make at the plate, but eager to make, I’m just not seeing him all of a sudden hitting a wall. Sure, at some point he’ll start losing speed and that’ll affect his defensive range and baserunning, but why would the plate skills deteriorate all of a sudden?
Then again, few saw it coming with Jones.
The Mantle/Trout/Griffey route
All three of these players were on the path to having an argument as the best player in history before injuries derailed them in their 30s and left them as mere “all-time greats.”
Through Mickey Mantle’s age-30 season, he had 90.7 WAR. He averaged 121 games per year in his final six seasons, putting up 19.5 WAR. Through Ken Griffey Jr.’s age-30 season, he had 76.2 WAR. He played 10 more seasons, but only amassed 7.6 more WAR. Through Mike Trout’s age-27 season, he had 72.1 WAR (his top statistical similars were Mantle, Robinson and Griffey). We’ll skip 2020 for obvious reasons, but since then he’s averaged 90 games and 3.0 WAR per season.
Even with the drop-offs, it would be surprising to see Crow-Armstrong reach this level because it’s surprising to see any player reach this lofty standard. In career WAR among center fielders, Mantle is fourth, Trout is fifth and Griffey is sixth. They trail only Cobb, Speaker and the guy we’re going to discuss next. Joe DiMaggio is seventh.
The Mays route
Despite the lofty standard PCA set for himself in 2026, coming close to Willie Mays’ career would be jaw-droppingly shocking, and that is absolutely not intended as a slight.
Mays has an argument as the greatest player in baseball history and he put himself in that discussion by being good at everything and doing it all with great longevity. From his age-23 to -35 seasons, he led the majors in WAR eight times, leading the NL an additional two times. His worst seasons in that timeframe were 7.6 and 7.8 WAR. In that span, he also led the league in runs twice, hits once, triples three times, home runs three times, stolen bases four times, average once, on-base percentage once, slugging percentage five times and OPS five times.
Mays even posted 5.2 WAR at age 39 and 6.3 at age 40. He led the NL with a .425 OBP when he was 40 years old! He hit .345/.411/.667 at age 23.
Mays’ 156.2 career WAR ranks third among position players all-time behind two guys you might have heard of: Barry Bonds (162.8) and Babe Ruth (162.3).
I feel pretty strongly Pete Crow-Armstrong isn’t headed for a run at this career and that’s just fine.
The realistic long-term range for the 2026 National League MVP seems somewhere between Cedeño and Mantle. It’s a wide variance of outcomes between those two, obviously, as well it should be when the player we discuss is only 24 years old. For his name to be mentioned among these at all is a testament to the year Crow-Armstrong just put together.
