Pete Crow-Armstrong hit two more home runs in Cincinnati, ran his total to five in two days, and the Cubs lost anyway. That is the whole story and it is a strange one, because a player does not usually carry a team that hard and end up on the wrong end of the handshake line.
Start with what happened. The day before, Crow-Armstrong put up the first three-homer game of his career. Then he came back the next night and added two more. Five in two days out of a center fielder whose calling card coming up was his glove and his legs. And the reward for it was Chicago dropping its third consecutive series.
That is the part that should nag at the Cubs. One bad series is weather. Two is a stretch. Three in a row, in a stretch where your center fielder is doing something most players never do once, is a team problem, not a slump. When the best two days of a young hitter's life do not move the win column, the issue lives somewhere else on the roster.
checked the almanac: nate colbert once hit five home runs in a single day for the padres, a doubleheader in atlanta in 1972, thirteen runs batted in, still the standard for a day's work. crow-armstrong needed two days for his five. nobody is filing a complaint.
What matters now is what it means for the player. This is the leap teams wait on. Crow-Armstrong arrived with elite defense and speed, the kind of profile that plays every night regardless of the bat, and the open question was always whether the power would show up in games instead of batting practice. Two nights do not answer that. But two nights like these get logged, by his own club and by everybody else's advance scouts, and the book on him changes accordingly.
Chicago comes home for Milwaukee at Wrigley on Monday night, which is not a gentle landing after three lost series. That is the thing I am watching: whether the rest of the lineup turns up for the homestand, because right now one man is doing a season's worth of damage and the standings are not noticing.