Cubs star Pete Crow-Armstrong's teammates and coaches are helping him see the bigger picture

CINCINNATI – Cubs veteran first baseman Justin Turner can relate when young center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong talks about how hard it is to stay patient during a slump and trust that one swing can make it all click.

“I’m guilty of this too,” Turner said. “When you're younger, you get so caught in the microscope on how things feel today or in the moment. And it feels like the weight of the world's on his shoulders. But if you zoom out, and you look at the totality of the season that he's putting together, it's pretty incredible. But the human nature and the competitor and all of us is like, we want to be great every time we step in the box.”

Crow-Armstrong has commended Turner for being “super present in [his] offensive journey this year,” along with hitting coaches Dustin Kelly and John Mallee.

“The kind of support I've gotten all year, that definitely helps showing up to the field every day when stuff's not going my way,” Crow-Armstrong said on Monday, “and knowing that that support that I got comes in a ton of different shapes and sizes.”

Crow-Armstrong’s offensive journey included an extreme high for the first half of the season. Then he fell into a deep August rut and uneven September.

He entered Saturday, however, on an upswing, hitting .300 (6-for-20) on the road trip to that point, with a pair of doubles and a home run. Those were good signs for the Cubs, who are a better offensive team when Crow-Armstrong is clicking.

“What makes him a great player is he expects to do great things every single time,” Turner said. “What’s going to help him have a long and successful career is defining what success is. It’s so easy to look on the scoreboard and see 0-for-3 and think you had a failing night. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Did you make good decisions? Did you swing at the right pitches? Did you make good moves, and sometimes they make good pitches? Just because you aren't getting a result doesn't mean it's a failure.”

Turner’s “light bulb moment,” as he put it, came a few years into his Dodgers tenure through a conversation with manager Dave Roberts.

Turner hadn’t been hitting well early in the season, but Roberts was still consistently writing him in at No. 3 in the lineup. So, Turner walked into the manager’s office and told Roberts it wouldn’t hurt his feelings if he moved down in the batting order.

“He says, ‘Hey, look, yeah, you're not getting results, and the numbers don't look good,’” Turner recounted. “But he's like, ‘This is how I evaluate it: You're taking good at-bats, you're running deep counts, you're swinging at good pitches, you're not chasing. It's just not going well right now, the results aren't there. We evaluate you based on this process, not based on the results.’”

If that was how his manager was evaluating him, why was Turner using different measurements? So, he adjusted. But maintaining that mentality isn’t easy.

Said manager Craig Counsell: “You maybe evaluate yourself on, did it help feeling like that, did it help acting like that, did those thoughts help me, did the actions I took to try to change it help me? And you get better at kind of figuring that out, maybe. But there's a pressure to perform that doesn't necessarily go away. That's why people show up to watch you. That's real.”

So, let’s take the advice of the coaches and veteran players supporting Crow-Armstrong and zoom out.

Crow-Armstrong entered Saturday with 29 home runs, 90 RBI and 35 stolen bases this season, all comfortably topping his previous career totals. His home run count is almost triple his previous season high.

“As I played better this year, my own expectations grew for myself,” Crow-Armstrong said. “But [assistant hitting coach Juan Cabreja] has been saying it to me recently: you've already done your season, stat-wise. I did not go into spring training thinking I'd hit [29] home runs. So there is perspective in that, that I'm continuing to find out about and understand a little bit more.”

It can be helpful to ride into the postseason with confidence. But once playoff games begin, streaks and averages don’t matter. Statistics quite literally reset.

“It’s all a wash,” Crow-Armstrong said.

No matter the quality of the season, there can be something freeing about a clean slate.