The 2025 season transformed Pete Crow-Armstrong from a “good defender but weak hitter” into one of MLB’s most well-rounded players. A 5.4 fWAR, top 15 overall, an over-average bat, and the best gloves in baseball—it wasn’t a flash in the pan, it was a complete leap forward.
And now, MLB.com is proposing a theory that will raise eyebrows: Denzel Clarke could be the next PCA.
It sounds audacious. But when you separate the emotion from the name, the comparison… isn’t unreasonable.
On the defensive front, Clarke is even more formidable. In just 47 MLB games, he’s already achieved +13 outs above average—a number that, if he maintains that pace, would put him in the running for “best defender in baseball.” Pete Crow-Armstrong took the entire 2025 season to reach +24. Clarke accomplished more than half of that in less than a third of the time.
Clarke’s ball-handling style also felt very much like PCA: seemingly “impossible” shots were handled so effortlessly that the audience forgot the real difficulty. It was a kind of defense that not only saved runs—but also broke the opponent’s spirit.
The only issue, and the reason Clarke hasn’t been mentioned much, lies in his bat.
Clarke’s rookie season ended with a .230/.274 line and 75 wRC+—clearly below MLB standard. Three home runs in 47 games don’t say much about strength, especially when compared to PCA’s 30 home runs the previous season. But remember: before his breakout season in 2025, Crow-Armstrong only had… 10 home runs in 136 career games.
What MLB.com saw in Clarke wasn’t the results—but the foundation.
Clarke’s bat speed reached 74.3 mph, significantly higher than the league average (71.8). His 43% hard-hit rate shows the ball is anything but “weak.” And his 471-foot home run puts him among the extremely rare players with enough raw power to hit the ball that far. The problem isn’t that Clarke lacks power—it’s that he hasn’t yet converted that power into a consistent barrel.
Sound familiar? That’s exactly the problem the PCA solved in 2025.
The biggest difference that gives Clarke a chance to break through in 2026 may not be himself—but the surrounding context. The Association of Baseball (AAS) has a group of young, heavy hitters: Brent Rooker, Nick Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, Tyler Soderstrom. Clarke won’t be the center of pressure. He can play in the middle or back of the lineup, where mistakes are less exaggerated and adjustments can happen naturally.
That’s incredibly important for a player with Clarke’s profile—who needs the comfort to learn how to pick the right pitch and barrel at the right time.
Even if the bat hasn’t caught up yet, Clarke still delivers. 1.3 WAR in just 47 games with a below-average bat shows that simply being on the court and healthy is enough to make him a game-winner. Extend that to the entire season, and he’s a player with four WARs solely on defense.
The only question hanging over him is: if Clarke starts to “connect” bat speed, raw power, and barrel rate—is MLB facing another Pete Crow-Armstrong-style jump?
And if that happens, we might very well look back on 2026 as the moment when a name “only good at defense” suddenly became a total nightmare… just like PCA a year ago.
Leave a Reply