Pete Crow-Armstrong went 4-for-5 with a home run and two doubles, falling a triple short of the cycle, as the Chicago Cubs demolished the Pittsburgh Pirates 11-0 on Saturday night at PNC Park. The sellout crowd — heavily leavened with Cubs fans, per the Tribune’s account of the series — watched Crow-Armstrong notch extra-base hits in three consecutive innings: an RBI double off Paul Skenes in the fifth, another double off Isaac Mattson in the sixth, and a two-run homer off Ron Marinaccio in the seventh that made it 10-0.
The blast was his 23rd of the season.
For a player who’d been grinding through a pronounced second-half slump — six extra-base hits across 150 plate appearances and 38 games entering the series, per the Chicago Tribune — the outburst was a jolt. Crow-Armstrong’s first half was the engine behind a Cubs offense that ranked among the league’s best; he hit 27 home runs in an 83-game stretch before the All-Star break. The version that showed up Saturday looked more like that player than the one who’d been pressing.
The numbers tell a stranger story on the Pittsburgh side. Paul Skenes struck out 11 Cubs in 5⅓ innings — a dominant figure by any measure — yet surrendered five earned runs on six hits and two walks. The Cubs whiffed nine times against him through the first four innings, then solved him for three runs in the fifth and chased him during a five-run sixth. Skenes’ game score, a rough proxy for overall pitching effectiveness, would land somewhere in the mid-40s despite the double-digit strikeouts — a reminder that swing-and-miss stuff and run prevention don’t always travel together.
Shota Imanaga needed no such caveat. The Cubs left-hander held Pittsburgh to four hits over six shutout innings, striking out four and walking one. Jake Mangum was the only Pirate to reach second base against him, and that came on a throwing error by shortstop Dansby Swanson after a third-inning single. Imanaga’s outing lowered the leverage on every Cubs at-bat after the fifth-inning breakthrough — once the lead swelled, Pittsburgh’s win probability cratered and never flickered.
The loss dropped the Pirates to one game above .500, a sobering result for a franchise that had entered the homestand with postseason positioning at stake. The AP noted that Skenes had allowed just five runs total across his previous three starts — 18⅓ innings — before the Cubs matched that figure in a single night.
Crow-Armstrong’s season broader profile, per MLB.com, places him second to Shohei Ohtani in National League fWAR at