The Cubs get their crack at a three-game sweep of the White Sox at Wrigley at 2:21 p.m. ET Wednesday, and they arrive at it having won the first two in the most exhausting way baseball allows: back-to-back walk-offs. That is the Chicago Cubs news of the morning, and it is not a small thing. Two nights, two last swings, one very tired South Side bullpen.
Tuesday's was 4-3. Pete Crow-Armstrong opened the game with a home run that the wire credits as MLB history, though I don't have the exact mark spelled out in front of me yet, and I'm not going to guess at a record book entry. Then the whole thing sat there for nine innings until Alex Bregman's RBI single ended it. First swing of the night and last swing of the night. Baseball's sense of symmetry is better than it gets credit for.
The standings are what make this series more than a city bragging right. The White Sox are 65-60 and leading the AL Central, which is the quietest good story in the sport right now, and they have spent two nights in Wrigley losing games they had in hand. The Cubs are 74-53, second in the NL Central, chasing a Milwaukee club at 78-48 that has not slowed down. Neither of these teams is playing out a schedule. Both of them are playing games that will still matter in six weeks.
checked the almanac: these two clubs did not play a regular season game against each other until 1997, when interleague play arrived. a rivalry a century in the making and only three decades old on the field.
What comes next is the simple part. The Sox get one more afternoon to avoid the broom, and they get it against a Cubs team that has now had two straight nights of the crowd standing up in the ninth. Losing a series is one thing. Losing three in a row across town, two of them on the last pitch, follows a team onto the plane. Chicago's afternoon game is the one I'm watching.