Pete Crow-Armstrong hit the first pitch he saw over the wall and the last one that mattered too, and in between the Chicago Cubs found a way to beat the White Sox 7-5 in 10 innings at Wrigley on Monday night. Two Pete Crow-Armstrong home runs, one to open the game, one to end it. You can watch baseball for a decade and not see a night shaped like that.
The timing is what makes it more than a highlight package. This came on the heels of a four-hit game, which means the center fielder walked into the Crosstown series already hot and then decided to turn the dial. The wire has him in the NL MVP conversation, and nights like this are how those conversations stop being polite and start being arguments.
checked the almanac: rickey henderson finished with 81 career leadoff home runs, the most anybody has ever hit, and even he did not get to bookend many games with the other kind. the leadoff blast and the walk-off in the same nine, or ten, innings is one of the rarest shapes in the sport.
Context, because the standings make this series better than it looks on paper. The Cubs sit 73-53, second in the NL Central and chasing a Milwaukee club that has been the best team in the division all year at 77-48. The White Sox come in at 65-59 and, remarkably, in first place in the AL Central. Two Chicago teams, both playing games that count in the middle of August. That has not been the standard-issue Crosstown experience for a while, and the ballpark clearly knew it in the 10th.
What comes next is the middle game Tuesday at 8:06 PM ET, back at Wrigley, and the South Siders have the tougher assignment now: bounce back on the road after losing a game they were in until the last swing, against a lineup whose best player is seeing the ball like a beach ball. The Cubs' larger job is unchanged, run down the Brewers or hold serve in the wild card picture, and they need this version of their center fielder for six more weeks to do it.
I am watching whether the swing holds through the series. Hot weeks happen. Two-homer, four-hit, walk-off weeks are how a player changes what people think he is.