Yankees fans watching this one wanted someone to blame, and the obvious target was the guy on the mound. But Max Fried didn't lose this game. His team did.
Fried went 5.1 innings, allowed one earned run on two hits, and struck out seven. That's a start good enough to win most nights in this league. Instead, the Yankees walked out of Wrigley Field with a 5-2 loss to the Cubs on Saturday night, and the reason has nothing to do with Fried's fastball. It's what happened after he left.
Pete Crow-Armstrong is the name to remember from this game. He scored the Cubs' first run in the opening inning by working a walk and then hustling home on a pair of wild pitches, the kind of run that doesn't show up as a big swing but wins low-scoring games. Then, in the bottom of the seventh, after New York had briefly grabbed a 2-1 lead on a Spencer Jones home run, Crow-Armstrong ripped the go-ahead triple that flipped the game for good and came around to score again in the same inning. That's two separate go-ahead sequences, with Crow-Armstrong in the middle of both. Bleacher Nation's Cubs coverage went as far as calling him a future NL MVP, and sure, that's a fan site talking up its own guy in the moment, not something I'm ready to sign off on. But you don't need MVP hype to see he was the best player on the field.
The turning point came in the bottom of the seventh, when Nico Hoerner tied the game with a home run off Fernando Cruz and Chicago kept piling on before the inning ended. New York's lead lasted about as long as it took to record the final out. Add in Michael Busch's RBI single in the eighth and the Cubs had the game put away.
This is a version of a story we've seen from this Yankees team all year: the pitching staff does its job, and the situational offense and bullpen don't do theirs. New York came into this game riding strong work from the rotation while scuffling to hit at the level its record suggests, and Saturday was that pattern playing out in real time. Fried pitched a winning game. The lineup managed just enough to tie it in the fifth and grab a lead in the seventh, and the bullpen gave it right back.
There's a silver lining here. New York came back the next afternoon and won the rubber match behind Gerrit Cole, taking the three-game set. That matters. It means Saturday's collapse was a bad night, not a trend, at least not yet. But if you want to know what this game says about the Yankees heading into the stretch run, it's this: they can pitch with anybody in the league right now. Whether they can hit and hold leads consistently enough to matter in October is still an open question, and nights like this one are exactly why.
