You can win a baseball game a hundred different ways. You almost never win one by having the same player throw the first punch and the last punch. Pete Crow-Armstrong did exactly that Monday night at Wrigley, and the Cubs beat the White Sox 7-5 in 10 innings because of it.
Start with the symmetry, because it's absurd. Crow-Armstrong turned on the first pitch of the night and drove it out for a leadoff homer, his fifth leadoff shot of the season. Then, in the 10th, he ended things by pulling a 2-1 slider from Hagen Smith into the right-field patio, a two-run walk-off that scored automatic runner Carson Kelly. First swing of the game, last swing of the game, both over the wall. That line, four hits with three going for extra bases, a stolen base, a leadoff homer and a walk-off homer in the same game, had never happened before in MLB history. The leadoff-on-the-first-pitch, walk-off-on-the-last-pitch combination hadn't been done in nearly 70 years.
The box score shows he didn't just bookend the game, he carried it. He finished 4-for-5 with a single, a double, two home runs, two runs scored, three RBI, a steal and a walk. It was his 30th homer of the season, one shy of his career high, and with his stolen-base total up to 31 he now has back-to-back 30-30 seasons. That's an MVP-shaped stat line packed into one nine-inning window that needed overtime to hold it all.
This is the signature night of his MVP case, and it isn't close. His teammates said as much. "He's been our MVP, and then just the direction that he's taken our team when a lot of us were struggling early in the year," Nico Hoerner said. "He put the team on his back and he's been absolutely incredible with those big moments, and hopefully many more to come." Call that clubhouse loyalty if you want. The scorecard backs it up.
What gets lost in the fireworks is that the White Sox had this game in hand more than once. They got out-hit 14-4 and still kept punching back. Randal Grichuk's three-run homer in the fourth flipped it to a 3-2 White Sox lead, one that came off Shota Imanaga and counted as his 29th home run allowed on the year. Andrew Benintendi's two-run shot in the eighth, off Cubs deadline pickup Ryan Zeferjahn, put the South Siders back in front. Twice they led on four hits total, and twice it wasn't enough. When you take the lead late on the road with a fraction of the other team's offense, you're basically daring the baseball gods to even things up. They obliged.
Don't read this as a referendum on the White Sox. They came into Wrigley having won six of their last eight, fresh off sweeping Detroit, and they'd taken two of three from the Cubs on the South Side earlier this year. This loss dropped them to 65-59, but it didn't knock them out of first in the AL Central. They're a real team having a real season, which is why this weekend mattered: for only the second time in 18 years, both Chicago teams met in the Crosstown Classic with winning records on both sides.
The result evened the season series at 2-2 and tightened the Cubs' hold on the top National League wild-card spot, with their record climbing to 73-53. There's plenty of series left to play. But this rivalry has now produced extra-inning walk-off theater on both sides in 2026, with Edgar Quero ending the May meeting for the White Sox and Crow-Armstrong answering in August.
The difference this time: one player wrote the opening line and the closing line, and left everyone else to fill in the middle.
