I love baseball more than pretty much any other sport for the infinite possibilities of weird stories the game can produce – the story of Phil Ozersky, the baseball field at Area 51, Bobby Bonilla Day, and Ken Griffey Kr. napping in the clubhouse during a game are just a few we’ve recently covered here – and another fun one has to do with Chicago Cubs prospect Pete Crow-Armstrong.
The Cubs rookie is the team’s top prospect, recently called up to the big-league team as Chicago makes its playoff push. But his skill set and exciting future in Major League Baseball just isn’t as interesting right now as who his mother is.
Ashley Crow has been an actress for decades and she just so happens to be Pete Crow-Armstrong’s mom. But what’s really great here is that she also played the mother in the 1994 film Little Big League, a movie in which a 12-year-old boy becomes the manager of the Minnesota Twins (If you want to hear more about Little Big League – and who doesn’t? – be sure to check out our Revenge of the ’90s podcast episode about it),
And now, everything has come full circle as Crow now has her own son playing in the major leagues (she’s going to have to wait a while – maybe! – to see him potentially become a manager). It’s unfortunate Pete doesn’t play for the Twins, though it’s possible that would have ripped a hole in the space-time continuum and our concept of reality itself would have been torn to shreds.
So maybe it’s all for the best, but it’s still cool that the worlds of baseball movies and the game itself have collided in this way. Another weird baseball story is officially in the books.
