The Chicago Cubs have maintained an awfully low profile for a team that 1) wins often, and by a lot of runs, 2) homers more than anyone, and 3) has an increasingly sure-thing MVP patrolling center now that Shohei Ohtani is slumping through his ouchy season. The Cubs hit nine homers on Monday night in a full 17-3 clocking of the Milwaukee Brewers, the team with the best record in baseball, and it landed as quietly as something that inherently loud could land. That feat has been eclipsed only once in baseball history, but it was also eclipsed more or less instantaneously by one homer that very dramatically wasn't.
That the Cubs are the secret in plain sight may be for any number of reasons, starting with the fact that none of those nine dingers was hit by Pete Crow-Armstrong, the MVP we mentioned a paragraph ago and the latest anagrammatic athlete in the American playground; no, he stayed stuck at 38, trailing only Kyle Schwarber in all of baseball. Crow-Armstrong—we're all adults here, and we can type and read full names, even hyphenated ones—leads everyone in WAR, Offensive WAR, Adjusted OPS+, and lots of other fun metrics you won't have to look up. He is the second best hitter in baseball besides Yordan Alvarez, as well as an excellent defensive player, and he has played in every game this year, an increasingly appreciated skill in the load management era. He vibrates his way through all the games he never misses, and in short is not just the consensus MVP but the MFP—Most Fun Player.
But while Crow-Armstrong is the Cubs' best player by a decent margin, he's not alone in terms of power production. The Cubs in general are mad bombers of the first order; in their last eight games, they have won 19-2, 17-5, and 17-3, and have hit double digits in more than a quarter (20 of 78) of their wins and topped eight in 40, of which they managed to lose two, including one over the weekend. The wonder is how they remain seven games behind the Brewers, which may be partially answered by the fact that they are also tied for last in home runs allowed—a truly preposterous 209—which at the current pace would make them the 15th most generous pitching staff in the sports history when it comes to giving up homers. Now how do you not market the hell out of that?
Add to all this the White Sox, who have wrapped themselves up in Pope-ly vestments and put together a dinger-forward lineup of their own, and you have one of the most delightful seasons in Chicago's recent history. True, nobody is buying the Sox as any more capable of reaching the World Series than the Cubs, but buying stock in baseball teams now is for the boors on Kalshi, for as long as that lasts.
Yet it's tempting to do it, mostly because of last night. In fairness, though, three of those nine Cubs home runs came in the seventh and eighth innings, off first baseman Andrew Vaughn, who was pressed into service as the rare knuckleball/eephus dual specialist; his pitches never topped 44 mph coming in but often topped 100 going out. His season ERA ballooned to 30.00 (he'd had one previous stint as a slaughtered lamb in a 16-3 loss to the Giants) in an outing that was loud enough to bump the combined pitching line of the 54 position players that have taken the mound over 134 games to 11.43 for the season. If you're going to give up, after all, give up big. And often, too. The A's have used Carlos Cortes in that role so often (eight times) that he is listed on Baseball Reference as "Outfielder, Pinch Hitter, and Pitcher." So is Colorado's rare C/P/1B Brett Sullivan. The position player-as-pitcher is now just a regular thing, certainly regular enough that those three homers off Vaughn are now fully valid.
But even if you apply the Those Last Three Don't Count metric, and you shouldn't, you're still looking at the Cubs being maybe the best buy in baseball if you're considering a team to pick up down the stretch, provided that you're not into that five-straight-bunt-singles thing that Curacao did in the Little League World Series. The Dodgers, for the moment, are no longer Galactus no matter what MLB is trying to sell. The Brewers are to be doubted in the postseason until they provide reason to believe otherwise. The game may implode given the owners' greed at some point in the near future, which makes it all the more appealing to get goofy with it today. And for now, the Cubs are now fully Worth The Bother, which is a metric all its own.
