PCA Snags Record 33rd 5-Star Catch
Pete Crow-Armstrong is the best defensive center fielder in baseball right now and is probably the best overall defender in the game. By the time his career is over, he might be able to lay claim to the best who ever lived. There’s no easy way to make a definitive comparison against the likes of Willie Mays and other players from the past, but Statcast has a variety of metrics that tell us how PCA stacks up against his more recent peers. And by at least one of them, he no longer has a peer.
With his 33rd “5-Star Catch” in Monday night’s loss to the Tigers, a diving grab that required the center fielder to range 70 feet in roughly four seconds, PCA passed Kevin Kiermaier for the all-time lead. It’s pretty fitting that he did so on grass curated by Dan Kiermaier, the retired outfielder’s older brother. Making the milestone even more impressive is the fact that Crow-Armstrong needed only 3,244 innings to get there. Statcast began tracking this data in 2016, after which Kiermaier played 6,925 innings.
Even if we assume the former Ray, Blue Jay, and Dodger played at the same level through parts of the three seasons he played prior to tracking, we’re looking at another nine such catches. Maybe 10 if we stretch it because he was perhaps a little faster. That would put him at 42 5-Star Catches, or nine ahead of PCA. A little cocktail napkin math tells us it would take the Cubs superstar a little less than a full season of work to get to that number, so it’s not like this is just a matter of playing his whole career in the Statcast era.
That’s because, as MLB.com’s Mike Petriello laid out, PCA converts these plays at a higher rate than anyone else. He’s successfully made a 5-Star Catch on 53.2% of his attempts, nearly twice the rate of other defensive luminaries like Kiermaier (27.6%) and Billy Hamilton (26.7%). When Pat Hughes said on the radio broadcast that PCA is “One of the only people on the planet who makes that play,” he might have actually been selling the kid short.
Out of almost 1,600 opportunities for MLB defenders to make 5-Star Catches this season, only 131 have been executed. Some more quick math tells us that PCA’s success rate is about six and a half times higher. He’s not just better, he’s so much better that he has completely recalibrated our understanding of what elite defense looks like. He makes plays almost no one else can make, and he often makes them look so easy that we think little of it.
Oh yeah, I just realized that we haven’t even talked about what a 5-Star Catch actually is. Using a formula that accounts for time, distance, direction, and environment (like a wall, for instance), Statcast ascribes catch probability to every ball put in play. Any that are hauled in despite a probability of 25% or lower are considered worthy of a handful of stars. The catch he made on a fly ball from former Cubs great Zach McKinstry had just a 5% catch probability
Crow-Armstrong is by no means perfect, a fact his detractors will point out every time he makes a mistake. But that would be like denigrating Nolan Ryan for giving up a home run or saying Ted Williams wasn’t an elite hitter because he struck out once in a while. It’s hard to even put PCA’s performance in the proper context because there are no accurate comparisons in the game right now, and probably won’t be for some time. Maybe there never will be.
Perhaps the best part about this is that we get a constant reminder of just how badly the Mets screwed up that trade.
