Pete Crow-Armstrong hit his 40th home run of the season Sunday afternoon in Miami. The Cubs lost 10-3. Both of those things happened, and only one of them is going to matter in twenty years.
That is the strange arithmetic of a long season. A milestone swing gets swallowed by a seven-run margin, the highlight package leads with the wrong team, and a guy who just did something almost nobody in franchise history has done walks off the field having lost a ballgame by a touchdown. September does that. It also does the other thing, which is keep the count climbing while everyone is watching the standings instead.
How rare is a 40-home-run season for a Cubs center fielder?
Rare enough that you have to go rummaging to find company. The Cubs' 40-homer club is not a crowd: Hack Wilson, Ernie Banks, Andre Dawson, Ryne Sandberg, Derrek Lee, Sammy Sosa. That is Cooperstown, near-Cooperstown, and a couple of the loudest seasons the North Side has ever produced. Crow-Armstrong is now in that room, and he got there while playing the most demanding defensive position on the field every day.
That last part is the piece I keep chewing on. Power from center field is a different animal than power from a corner or first base. You do not get to hide anybody there. The center fielder covers the most ground, makes the most reads, takes the most wear, and Crow-Armstrong has been doing that job while running his home run total to 40 with more than three weeks of baseball still on the calendar. Forty is a number. Forty from that spot on the diamond is a season.
checked the almanac: hack wilson hit 56 for the cubs in 1930, and that stood as the national league record for 68 years until the 1998 summer went sideways. one beat of wonder, then back to business.
What happened in the Cubs' 10-3 loss to the Marlins?
Miami won it going away, 10-3, and I am not going to pretend I have the full inning-by-inning in front of me. What I do have is the shape, and the shape is ugly for Chicago: a double-digit output for the home club on a Sunday getaway day, a three-run answer that never threatened, and a solo milestone that read more like a footnote than a celebration.
Give the Marlins their due here, because nobody else will. Miami has spent the back half of this schedule playing the role of the team nobody wants to draw in September, and hanging ten on a contender in your own park is the kind of afternoon a young roster remembers in March. Spoiler work is real work. The teams that do it well in September tend to show up sooner than you expect.
What comes next for the Cubs and the Marlins
Chicago goes to Milwaukee on Monday afternoon, first pitch 2:11 ET, which is about as unforgiving a place to take a loss like this as the National League offers. Nothing cleanses a getaway-day beating like a road series against the team in front of you, and nothing exposes a tired club faster either.
Miami stays home and gets the Mets on Monday at 1:11 ET, another chance to make somebody else's September complicated.
As for Crow-Armstrong, the watch is simple from here. He has 40 with the season not yet finished, and the only thing standing between him and a number the franchise talks about for a while is health and playing time. I will be watching whether the Cubs keep running him out there every day in center once the games start to squeeze, because the milestone and the pennant race are not always pulling in the same direction. My guess is he wants no part of a rest day. Guys chasing something rarely do.