Welcome to The Pregame Lineup, a weekday newsletter that gets you up to speed on everything you need to know for today's games, while catching you up on fun and interesting stories you might have missed. Today's edition is brought to you by David Adler.
How head-and-shoulders above the rest of the league is Pete Crow-Armstrong right now? Well ... does the name "Mickey Mantle" mean anything to you?
PCA is barreling toward the 40-40 club, and he'll probably get there before the season's out. But today we want to talk about a different club he can join: the 10-WAR club.
The Cubs star, who hit his 42nd home run and stole his 37th base and just kept being awesome last night, is now sitting at an MLB-best 10.1 Wins Above Replacement, according to FanGraphs.
That's basically just a fancy way to say, "The Cubs are winning a lot more games with PCA than they would if they had to go out and grab a random guy to replace him." WAR is a good, quick way to compare players, and what PCA's WAR tells us is: He's the best player in baseball by a very wide margin.
That much is probably obvious if you've watched Crow-Armstrong work his magic this year. But we want to emphasize: A 10-WAR player is a truly elite-tier player. Only the best of the best reach that level.
So it's no wonder PCA is going to run away with the National League MVP Award. If he finishes the season with 10-plus WAR, he'll be in territory that only Aaron Judge, Bobby Witt Jr., Mookie Betts and Mike Trout have reached in the last 15 years. Even Shohei Ohtani has never had a 10-WAR season (yet).
But even that "10 WAR" number doesn't do justice to how dominant Crow-Armstrong's 2026 season has been. You also have to look at how he's lapping the field.
PCA is over three wins better than the second-best player in the Majors -- which is still Ohtani at 6.8 WAR (despite Shohei not having pitched in months), just ahead of Witt, Jacob Misiorowski and Cam Schlittler.
That is a huge gap between No. 1 and No. 2. In fact, it would be the largest gap between the best two players in a season since literally Mantle in 1956, which was one of the most iconic seasons ever.
If you look for every time in the Modern Era (since 1900) that the top player in the Majors has been so much better than everyone else, the list of names goes: Mantle, Ruth, Hornsby … and that's it.
