New York Mets fans better prepare for plenty more reminders about how the team sold Pete Crow-Armstrong for two months of Javier Baez and a year and a half of Trevor Williams. It’s one of those mockeries not going away anytime soon.
Currently a favorite to win the National League MVP, it’s kind of easy to forget just where he was only a season ago. While he did finish 9th, he spent his first full season in 2024 as more of an A.J. Ewing-type with defense and speed over any kind of bat production. In 2025, he found his power stroke but still hit under .250 and didn’t even end the year with an OBP over .300.
Things have absolutely changed in 2026 with PCA leading the league in multiple offensive categories. But before those statistics were included in his Baseball-Reference similarity score, his career batting stats matched those of a current Mets player. You’d never guess who because they’re so far from each other in oh-so-many ways.
This is the only place you’ll see Pete Crow-Armstrong compared to Mark Vientos
You need to see it to believe it. Near the bottom part of everyone’s Baseball-Reference page is a section where batters are compared to others by age and also by career totals. Both on Crow-Armstrong’s page and Mark Vientos’, we see the comparison. How did this happen?
The score has yet to take into account the 2026 season. When you keep that in mind, it makes a little more sense.
PCA came into this season with a lifetime .722 OPS. Vientos was at .732. The score was 41 home runs vs. 57, 143 RBI vs. 157, and an insanely close slash line of .240/.285/.437 against .239/.294/.438. The MVP-caliber campaign out of Crow-Armstrong and the continued demise of Vientos has separated the two far greater. Crow-Armstrong now has an .803 OPS lifetime. Vientos is at .718.
As much rhythm as their bats had coming into 2026, Crow-Armstrong had already accomplished much more with his style of play. Literally a contender for being the best defensive player in the sport with 40/40 potential thanks to power and speed, he can do more on an 0-for-4 day at the plate than Vientos. They were never anything alike and yet the offensive output coming into the year measured closer to each other than anyone else in the history of the sport.
Factors like this are one of the possibilities as to why the Mets haven’t been so brazen about moving on from Vientos. Although they tried in the offseason, it seems as if they carved out a path for playing time based on other roster moves. That’ll change this winter as he has underperformed and proven too much of a liability on defense.
His monstrous 2024 season creeping further into the past, he better take a screenshot now of the PCA comparison because it’s going away once those scores reflect the results of 2026.
