Pete Crow-Armstrong drove a two-run homer into the seats Sunday and moved past Ernie Banks on a Chicago Cubs record list that had stood for 71 years.
The blast was Crow-Armstrong’s 45th of the season and the biggest swing in a 9-1 rout of the Cincinnati Reds at Great American Ball Park. It came in the fifth inning off right-hander Carson Spiers, a 411-foot drive that left the bat at 105.3 mph and made the score 8-1.
Crow-Armstrong finished three for five with a double, three runs, two RBIs and a stolen base. The center fielder also scored in the first and third innings as Chicago piled up 13 hits.
The home run gave him the Cubs record for most homers in a season by a player 24 or younger. Banks hit 44 in 1955, when he was also 24. No Cub that young had topped that total until Sunday.
Banks was in the second full season of what became a Hall of Fame career. He later hit 47, 45, 43 and 41 homers in other years, finished with 512 for his career and won National League MVP awards in 1958 and 1959.
Crow-Armstrong had already drawn even with Banks four days earlier. On Sept. 16 against Atlanta, he hit two homers to reach 44. That same night he also passed Billy Williams for the most homers by a left-handed hitter in Cubs history. Williams hit 42 in 1970.
Sunday’s homer also pulled Crow-Armstrong into a tie with Philadelphia’s Kyle Schwarber for the major league lead. Chicago as a team has 217 homers, the most in baseball. The last time the Cubs led the majors in home runs was 1958, when Banks hit 47.
Crow-Armstrong is now two stolen bases from a 40-40 season. He has 38 steals after swiping a bag in the first inning Sunday. A year ago he finished with 31 homers and 35 steals, becoming just the second Cub to post a 30-30 season after Sammy Sosa.
The rest of the 2026 line is just as loud. In 156 games he is hitting .280 with 30 doubles, eight triples, 107 RBIs, 118 runs and a .949 OPS. The 118 runs lead the majors. He has 170 hits in 607 at-bats, with a .371 on-base percentage and a .578 slugging percentage.
Baseball-Reference credits him with 9.6 WAR. FanGraphs has him at 10.4. Either number puts him at the front of the National League MVP race with a week left in the regular season.
Durability has been part of the story. Crow-Armstrong has played in every Cubs game this year and has spent nearly all of it in center field. He won a Gold Glove in 2025 and has remained one of the league’s best defensive outfielders while carrying the offense.
The win improved Chicago to 87-69 and dropped its magic number for a postseason berth to one. The Cubs entered the day tied with San Diego and a game ahead of Philadelphia for the top National League wild-card seed.
Left-hander David Peterson did the rest. He allowed one run on three hits over seven innings, walked one and struck out seven. The only Cincinnati run came on a fourth-inning homer by JJ Bleday.
Chicago scored once in the first, four times in the third and three more in the fifth. Michael Conforto homered just before Crow-Armstrong in the fifth. Seiya Suzuki added a solo shot in the eighth.
The Cubs have six games left, starting Tuesday at Wrigley Field against Miami. Crow-Armstrong has six games to pick up two steals if he wants to join the 40-40 club. Only a handful of players in major league history have done that.
He already has the first 40-homer season by a Cub since Derrek Lee hit 46 in 2005. At 24 years old, he is also among a short list of left-handed hitters leaguewide to reach 40 homers before turning 25.
The power surge has come with extra-base volume across the board. Crow-Armstrong has 83 extra-base hits. Earlier this month he passed Williams’ Cubs mark for extra-base hits by a left-handed hitter in a season.
None of that erases Banks’ place in franchise history. It does mean a 24-year-old center fielder now sits one notch higher on one of the club’s oldest single-season lists, and he did it on a Sunday afternoon in Cincinnati with a two-run ball that no one was catching.
