Pete Crow-Armstrong hit three home runs Saturday against the Cincinnati Reds, then came back the next night and hit two more, and somebody needs to walk me through how a human being does that without changing species.
The Chicago Sun-Times had him at 36 home runs and MLB’s WAR leader before Saturday’s game even started, so this wasn’t some no-name journeyman finding lightning in a bottle. This is what a real Pete Crow-Armstrong home run streak looks like while it’s happening — not one signature game that gets clipped for highlight shows and forgotten by Wednesday, but a stretch where the outlier game turns out to be the new normal. Five home runs in two days isn’t a hot streak at that point, it’s a recalibration of what this guy’s swing can do, and the Cubs might be figuring that out on the same schedule as the rest of us.
Saturday’s line alone would’ve been enough content for a week. Crow-Armstrong led off the game with a homer to right-center off Andrew Abbott’s fastball, turned around in the second and pulled a curveball down the line for a two-run shot, and by the seventh had added a 444-foot three-run bomb off Tony Santillan that put Wrigley Field on its feet.
https://twitter.com/MLB/status/2093799948084990348
He came up again in the eighth with a real shot at a fourth home run, the moment that gets replayed for a decade, and grounded out instead. Nobody in that ballpark seemed disappointed, because three was already an absurd assignment for one evening.
Good. The universe needed at least one thing to go according to normal baseball physics that day.
Sammy Sosa was at Wrigley for the Chicago Cubs’ 150th anniversary celebration, found Crow-Armstrong before the game, and told him, “I want three out of you today. I need three.” Crow-Armstrong delivered exactly three and had no real explanation for it afterward: “Sure enough. I don’t know what he passed down to me there.” Manager Craig Counsell called it a performance you don’t see much, and when your manager starts talking like that, you know something strange is happening in the building.
Then Sunday happened, because apparently nobody told Crow-Armstrong the binge was supposed to stop at one game. He led off Sunday Night Baseball with another homer and added a second later that pulled Chicago within two, his fifth multi-homer game of the season, even though the Reds still won 7-5.
https://twitter.com/MLB/status/2094253189230928358
Do the math on this Crow-Armstrong home run streak and it’s absurd: 36 home runs walking into Saturday, plus three, plus two, and by my count he crossed 40 for the season sometime during Sunday’s game without anyone pausing to mark the occasion because they were still processing Saturday. His WAR jumped to 9.1, fourth-best single season in Cubs history, and that’s the number that should worry the rest of the National League more than any individual home run does.
None of this needs to be relitigated as the MVP case that got weird over the weekend — that conversation is already happening elsewhere, and it’s not the point today. The point is that this isn’t even his first unhinged week of the summer; ask anyone who watched the leadoff-and-walk-off game against the White Sox how often this guy manufactures chaos out of a normal Tuesday.
Crow-Armstrong says his whole approach right now is just “seeing baseballs being thrown at me and hitting them,” which is either the most boring quote of the season or the scariest one.
I’d bet on scary.
