Pete Crow-Armstrong Becomes Baseball's Seventh 40/40 Player

One stolen base in the first inning against Miami on Thursday put Pete Crow-Armstrong in a group with six names, and none of them wear a Cubs uniform. Forty home runs, forty stolen bases, one season, a threshold only six players in MLB history had ever crossed before him.

First Inning, One Stolen Base, Seven Names in History

Crow-Armstrong swiped his 40th bag in the opening frame against the Marlins, pairing it with 45 home runs already banked through 158 games. The 40/40 club now has seven members total, and Crow-Armstrong is the only one of them who did it in a Cubs uniform, a franchise that has existed since 1876 and never once produced this stat line before this week.

He is 24 years old, hitting .280 with a .373 on base percentage and a .577 slug, and he has driven in 107 runs while doing it, numbers that would headline a season on their own before anyone mentions the stolen bases at all.

Alfonso Soriano Was the Last Cub Anyone Compared Him To

Soriano hit 46 homers with 41 steals for the Nationals in 2006, clinching the milestone with a first inning steal of second base against Milwaukee, not for the Cubs, before he ever put on Chicago pinstripes the following winter. Crow-Armstrong just did what Soriano never managed to do in a Cubs jersey specifically, closing a gap that has sat open since a franchise founded in the 1870s first started keeping stat sheets.

That matters for a team whose identity has run through pitching and defense more than five tool speed for most of the last two decades. A center fielder who steals 40 bags and clears 45 homers in the same year is not the profile Wrigley Field fans have spent recent seasons scouting for, and the Cubs front office did not draft for this outcome so much as watch it happen.

Barry Bonds Did It in 1996. Jose Canseco Started the Club in 1988.

The full 40/40 roster now reads Canseco in 1988, Bonds in 1996, Rodriguez in 1998, Soriano in 2006, Acuña in 2023, Ohtani in 2024 and Crow-Armstrong in 2026, a list that spans steroid era sluggers, a generational shortstop and the best two way player alive before landing on a 24 year old outfielder nobody projected for this ceiling three years ago. Three of those seven seasons happened in the last four years, which says as much about how the modern game rewards a five tool profile as it says about any one player.

Ohtani did it as a pitcher who also hits. Bonds did it in the middle of the most scrutinized power surge in league history. Crow-Armstrong did it as a center fielder whose defensive value alone would have justified an everyday lineup spot before he added the power. Ohtani reached 300 career home runs this year as the first Japanese born player to do it, a career milestone that still sits behind Crow-Armstrong's single season line on the one leaderboard both players are chasing right now.

36 and 32 in August. 45 and 40 by Thursday.

A three home run game against Cincinnati on August 29 put Crow-Armstrong at 36 homers and 32 steals, the performance that first flipped FanDuel's National League MVP odds in his favor over Shohei Ohtani. Twenty six days later he added nine homers and eight steals to close out the 40/40 line, a pace that would have seemed absurd stated in August and reads as inevitable in September.

That is not a hot week. That is five weeks of a player adding a full extra home run for every three days on the calendar while still running the bases like a leadoff hitter. The power did not slow down once the steal total became the story, which is the detail that separates a milestone chase from a full season.

The MVP Math Cubs Fans Have Been Doing Since August

FanDuel had Crow-Armstrong at minus 190 to win National League MVP back in late August, favored over Ohtani for a Cubs player in a way that would have sounded like a joke in March. Completing the 40/40 club in the final week of September is the kind of box score line voters remember when a ballot gets filled out, regardless of how close the counting stats finish between him and Ohtani.

Cubs fans have watched close finishes before and learned not to celebrate early. This one is different because the number is already final. Nobody takes away a completed 40/40 season, whatever the Cubs do in October, and whatever the MVP voters decide, Crow-Armstrong's name is permanently attached to six others who changed how the sport thought about what one player could do in one year.

The counterpoint is fair. Ohtani's 2024 version of this club came with a World Series ring at the end of it, and a stat line alone has never guaranteed an MVP vote when the other candidate's team wins in October. Crow-Armstrong cannot control what the Cubs do from here, only what he already banked, and 45 homers plus 40 steals is the kind of banked number a voter has to explain away rather than simply outweigh.