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Pete Crow-Armstrong
Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong celebrates a home run (August 17, 2026)
While the Brewers are largely dominating the NL Central this season, one of their rivals has far and away the league’s Most Valuable Player.
Over the weekend Cubs outfielder Pete Crow-Armstrong became the first (and likely only) player this season to reach a value of 10.0 Wins Above Replacement according to FanGraphs. He’s the third player in as many seasons to reach that mark (Aaron Judge got there for the Yankees in 2024 and 2025 and Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. did it in 2024), but across recent history it’s an extremely rare feat. Since the Brewers’ expansion season as the Seattle Pilots in 1969 only 17 position players have reached that mark. Baseball Reference is a little lower on Crow-Armstrong and has his value at just over nine wins, but even that is one of the top 50 single season performances of the last nearly six decades.
It says a lot about how far the Brewers have come as an organization that they served as a hurdle in Crow-Armstrong’s epic season instead of a steppingstone towards lofty numbers. Longtime fans may recall, for example, the Brewers’ role in Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s chase of the single season home run record in 1998: The Brewers accounted for 7.8% of Sosa’s games played that season but 12 (18%) of his 66 home runs, nearly singlehandedly keeping Sosa in the chase.
This season, however, Crow-Armstrong is putting up big numbers in spite of the Brewers instead of because of them. He appeared in 13 games against Milwaukee this season and batted just .163 with a .281 on-base percentage and .286 slugging, posting a .566 on-base plus slugging that is almost 400 points lower than his corresponding mark against everyone else.
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Here are a few of the other all-time great seasons where the Brewers were a part of someone else’s highlight reel:
2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004 Barry Bonds
It goes without saying, of course, that baseball’s all-time home run leader hit well against everybody, not just the Brewers, but during his peak years Barry Bonds made more hay against the Brewers than anyone else. Baseball Reference keeps the statistic “tOPS+,” which measures a player’s performance in a specific situation against their overall performance, and Bonds was better against the Brewers than against the league as a whole by that measure from 1998, the first season he faced them, every single year through 2006. That total includes four consecutive years where Bonds reached 10 or more FanGraphs WAR, accounting for almost 25% of the 10 WAR seasons in the last 60 years. During that time Bonds batted .403 with a .606 on-base and 1.000 slugging against the Brewers as compared to a .349/.559/.809 overall line.
1991 Cal Ripken Jr.
Back during the Brewers’ American League days, they routinely faced stars as members of the American League East but Cal Ripken Jr.’s 1991 MVP season was one of the best among them. Ripken played in every game for Baltimore that season, his tenth consecutive season doing so, played shortstop and led the American League in total bases. He was only the second player to do both of those things in the same year since 1965 (Robin Yount was the other in 1982). He faced the Brewers 13 times that season, tied for the most games against any opponent, and batted .364/.397/.709 against them as compared to .323/.374/.566 against everyone else for an OPS difference of almost 200 points.
1990 Rickey Henderson
The last time the Brewers successfully held a player in check during an all-time great season came against one of their greatest rivals: Henderson played 158 times against the Brewers in his career, nearly a full season’s worth of games, and stole 87 of his all-time record 1406 bases against them. Henderson saw the Brewers a lot during his best season in 1990, however, and he wasn’t as successful against them as he was in other scenarios.
Long before Wins Above Replacement models would make it clear that Henderson was having one of the all-time great seasons, he still rode an unlikely batting profile to the American League MVP Award in 1990 by hitting a career-best 28 home runs while also leading his league in runs scored, on-base percentage and stolen bases. He may have leveled up against the league as a whole but against the Brewers he was only very good: His .268 batting average, .376 on-base and .401 slugging were about 50, 60 and 170 points lower than his season numbers, respectively.
Even in this case, however, Henderson was still a very good player against the Brewers while he was incandescent against nearly everyone else. Even the franchise’s best performance ever against an all-time, great single season performance pales in comparison to the level to which they were able to limit Pete Crow-Armstrong this year.
