The Chicago Cubs scored 30 unanswered runs across three games this week, the most in franchise history, and turned that record into a 5-4 loss before the ninth inning was over.
The mark broke the 1969 team’s record of 29, set when that Cubs club shut out the Giants 8-0 and then beat the Padres 2-0 and 19-0, according to Yahoo Sports’ rundown of the comparison. Fifty-seven years is a long time to hold a number. This year’s version got there with a 19-2 demolition of the Mariners on Sunday and a 7-0 shutout at Chase Field on Monday, part of what ESPN logged as a club record. Then Chicago needed one more unanswered run in the eighth inning Tuesday to pass it, got it, and lost the record and the game inside the same nine innings.
Sunday and Monday were the kind of blowouts that make a fanbase start believing something, a Cubs offense that’s been steamrolling people all month finally clicking at the same time the pitching did. Michael Conforto and Carson Kelly both went deep in the sixth inning Monday, turning a tight one at Chase Field into a laugher.
Tuesday looked like the third chapter of what was shaping up as the most dominant 72 hours in franchise history. Clay Holmes carried a 4-0 lead into the eighth inning, the latest evidence for the Clay Holmes bet that’s supposed to anchor this rotation, and the record sat one out away from becoming a formality.
It didn’t stay a formality.
Gabriel Moreno’s check-swing double in the eighth drove in Arizona’s first run since Sunday, the exact swing that snapped the streak.
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Three more runs off the Cubs bullpen turned a 4-0 laugher into a 4-3 nail-biter. The record was already banked by then. The lead built to protect it wasn’t.
Sure, a streak snapping isn’t inherently damning. Teams cool off after 30 unanswered runs; that’s baseball reverting to form. What’s damning is what happened next, nine outs after the record, in the same game the record was set in.
Tim Tawa drew a one-out walk off closer Jacob Webb in the ninth. Jose Fernandez pinch-ran and stole second. Two outs later, rookie Ryan Waldschmidt, pinch-hitting, turned a hung slider into a 408-foot, two-run shot, and the Arizona Diamondbacks walked off winners, 5-4.
“I just kind of went up there, and I wanted to have fun with it. I had a smile on my face,” Waldschmidt said afterward, per Arizona Sports. It was his second walkoff of the season — he beat the Dodgers with one on Aug. 7 — which means a rookie has personally authored two of the worst nights of Chicago’s summer.
Torey Lovullo put it plainly afterward: “We haven’t had a lot of really positive momentum and good vibes, we’ve been dealing with some stuff.” Brandon Pfaadt framed it simpler: “We’re resilient. That’s the fun part about our team is we’re never out of it.” Neither man sounded surprised that a four-run, eighth-inning lead wasn’t safe against them.
This team has been on both ends of a walkoff all season, Pete Crow-Armstrong delivering one against the White Sox a week ago on the kind of night Tuesday was supposed to be. This one flipped the ledger back the other way: the walkoff loss that ended the record streak landed in the same box score where the record itself was born, a mark that had stood since Nixon’s first year in office.
I watched Waldschmidt’s swing four times, and the part that gets me isn’t the ball. It’s how unbothered he looked jogging to first, like erasing 30 unanswered runs was a Tuesday.
Fifty-seven years of history, gone in the time it takes to round the bases.
