Pete Crow-Armstrong’s Playing Baseball on a Whole New Level, and Wrigley Knows It!
Foreword
As you may know, I’ve grown up and lived in Chicago my entire life, and have been a lifelong Cubs fan. I wrote this for the other Cubs fans out there who know exactly what I’m talking about when I say: we’re trained to never get excited.
⚾ ⚾ ⚾
I have watched this team lose in every way a baseball team can lose.
I've watched them lose 6-5 in the 14th. I've watched them lose because a guy stopped running. I've watched a bullpen turn a three-run lead into a two-hour hostage situation.
So understand what I mean when I say that what happened at Wrigley on Monday night was not a nice moment.
It was a statement.
And it was delivered by a 24-year-old center fielder who is currently the best player in the National League.
Bottom of the 10th. Tie game, 5-5.
Hagen Smith on the mound for the White Sox. Pete Crow-Armstrong leads off, gets a 2-1 slider, and drives it into the right-field patio.
Thirtieth home run of the year.
Second homer of the night.
First walk-off of his career.
And with 31 steals already banked, he becomes the first player in Cubs history with back-to-back 30-30 seasons.
He took his top hand off the bat and pointed at the sky before he'd taken three steps.
He knew.
⚾ The Full Ledger on Monday Night
Let's do the whole game, because the whole game matters.
1st Inning — 💥
Crow-Armstrong led off the first inning by turning around Luis Castillo's first pitch down the right-field line and out. That's his fifth leadoff homer of the season.
Four pitches later Seiya Suzuki went back-to-back to deep left-center.
Two-nothing before the Sox recorded an out.
4th Inning — 😬
Randal Grichuk gets Shota Imanaga for a three-run shot and the Sox lead 3-2.
That's the 29th home run Imanaga has surrendered this season, which is the number that will decide whether he's a playoff starter or a matchup guy in October.
Otherwise Imanaga was excellent — six innings, ten strikeouts, only his sixth double-digit-K game in 79 career starts.
One pitch.
That's the whole outing in one pitch.
5th Inning — 🤷
Cubs get two back on a tapped grounder and a throwing error.
Not pretty. Counts the same.
7th Inning — 🫠
The inning that would have haunted a lesser team.
Bregman singles for his third hit, Happ sacrifices him over — only the sixth sac bunt the Cubs have laid down all year, tied for the fewest in baseball — Hoerner singles but not deep enough to score him.
Then Bregman gets picked off third by Jake Rogers on a Hoerner steal attempt.
In August. In a one-run game. Against the White Sox.
8th Inning — 😑
Ryan Zeferjahn, the deadline addition, throws one pitch to pinch-hitter Andrew Benintendi, and Benintendi puts it in the right-field basket.
Two-run shot. Sox lead 5-4.
9th Inning — 👀
Nico Hoerner, who finished 4-for-5, singles home the tying run.
Top of the 10th — 🫣
Jacob Webb loads the bases and gets out of it.
Zero runs.
Bottom of the 10th — 🚀
See above.
📊 Final Line
Cubs: 14 hits, zero errors.
Sox: four hits, two errors.
Chicago went 4-for-16 with runners in scoring position, which is exactly the kind of night that used to end 5-4 the other way.
It's the Cubs' twelfth walk-off win of the season, which leads Major League Baseball.
That's not luck. Twelve times is a trait.
📍 Where the Season Actually Stands
73-53.
Four and a half back of Milwaukee, who at 77-48 refuse to be normal about anything.
Fourth-best record in the National League, which right now means the top wild card slot and a road series in October unless something changes in the next six weeks.
Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud on the North Side:
The Cubs got run over by the Cardinals at home over the weekend.
8-4 on Saturday.
11-4 on Sunday.
Then on Sunday they lost Dansby Swanson to an oblique and Edward Cabrera to a finger blister, both to the IL.
You lose your shortstop and a starter in the same afternoon and then the crosstown series shows up on Monday.
That's the schedule not caring about your feelings.
So they won it anyway.
With a patched-together infield.
With Imanaga giving up a three-run homer.
With their third baseman getting picked off third base.
Bregman has been worth the money since the calendar flipped to August. Hoerner is doing what Hoerner does. Suzuki is running hot.
And Crow-Armstrong is in an actual MVP race with Shohei Ohtani, who also hit two home runs Monday night, because of course he did.
PCA entered the night hitting .276 with a .906 OPS, and he plays the best center field in baseball.
That last part is not a tiebreaker to me.
It's the argument.
🚇 About the Team in the Other Dugout
I'm not going to be cute about this.
The White Sox are 65-59 and in first place in the American League Central, five and a half up on Detroit, and they came into Wrigley off a sweep in Detroit having won six of eight.
This is a franchise that lost 121 games in 2024 and 102 in 2025.
They opened this season 6-13.
Will Venable has them playing nine innings hard every single night, Munetaka Murakami has been a legitimate middle-of-the-order bat in his first MLB season, and Colson Montgomery and Miguel Vargas have both been real.
They also took two of three from the Cubs on the South Side earlier this year.
So spare me.
For the first time in about a decade, this series has stakes on both ends of the Red Line.
Two more at Wrigley:
⚾ Tuesday at 7:05
⚾ Wednesday at 1:20
Both teams are playing for playoff seeding in the middle of August.
That hasn't happened here since 2008, and if you were around for 2008 you know why I'm not going to finish that sentence.
💙 The Part Where I Admit Something
I've been a Cubs fan my entire life, which means I have a nervous system permanently calibrated for disaster.
Monday night, when Benintendi's ball landed in the basket in the eighth, I did the math on the standings before the ball stopped rolling.
That's not pessimism. That's training.
And then Hoerner ties it.
And Webb escapes the tenth.
And Pete leads off the bottom half and puts it in the patio.
And for eight seconds, Wrigley sounds like the inside of a jet engine.
That's the whole thing.
That's why we do this.
Not because it always works out — I have decades of evidence that it does not — but because on a Monday night in August a kid who wasn't alive for the 2003 season can hit a baseball into the seats and make 40,000 people forget what they were worried about.
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Two more games.