The Chicago Cubs do not appear ready to lose a baseball game at Wrigley Field any time soon. Pete Crow-Armstrong's third walk-off hit in three days extended Chicago's home winning streak to fourteen on Wednesday night, sending the Cincinnati Reds out of town the wrong way for the third time in seventy-two hours.
The wins have been delivered with style. Wednesday's came in the ninth inning after a chaotic top-of-the-ninth from the Reds and a Cubs comeback that Cincinnati could not stop. Manager Craig Counsell, asked in his post-game interview to explain the run, did not pretend to have an answer.
"You feel like you've seen a lot of baseball games in your life," Counsell said. "And then you see stuff that you just don't expect to see."
The at-bat itself — Crow-Armstrong digging in against Reds reliever Tony Santillan — produced the kind of swing that wins baseball games and writes folklore. "I told Flash, 'you just don't know what's going to happen when Pete comes up,'" Counsell said. "I can't explain a lot of his at-bats."
Crow-Armstrong, with characteristic understatement, deflected the credit. "I can't give you a better explanation than he can," the centre fielder said. "I think I've always handled the pitch down relatively all right." Pressed on the swing itself, he added: "Being ready for a heater and running into that is kind of how to explain that one."
The Wrigley streak — three straight walk-offs and counting — has been a team achievement rather than a one-man show. Left fielder Ian Happ, asked whether the energy at Clark and Addison felt different to anywhere else in baseball, gave perhaps the cleanest summary of what is happening.
"Just another night at Wrigley," Happ said. "That's what it feels like. It was a good job of staying in it. It's easy in that situation to be down. I think that this team has a lot of fight."
The streak has lifted the Cubs to 25-12 and second in the National League Central, narrowing the gap to a Brewers team that had owned that division all spring. The starting pitching has been steady. The bullpen has been opportunistic. The bats have been late-inning lethal.
Reliever Trent Thornton, called up mid-game in a bullpen scramble, captured the chaos of being on the inside of a Wrigley walk-off. "My mind was spinning," he said.
Counsell has been Chicago's manager for two seasons and has watched his team grow into a contender by stitching together small advantages. The current home streak is the latest example.
The Reds finish the four-game set well and truly out of the conversation. The Cubs, by contrast, head into a seven-game homestand against St. Louis and the Mets with a Wrigley belief that may yet define the season.