For about a half inning Wednesday night at Busch Stadium, this was going to be a Pete Crow-Armstrong highlight reel with a happy ending. The Cubs outfielder turned on a Luis Gastelum changeup in the top of the 10th and put it in the seats, a two-run shot that gave Chicago a 2-0 lead and had Cubs Twitter ready to hand him the MVP trophy on the spot.
The homer that had Cubs fans convinced they'd just watched a season-defining moment.
It's the kind of swing that's made Crow-Armstrong one of the more fun watches in baseball this year — 24 bombs now, and this one came off the bat with enough force to erase any doubt about who was going to be the story of the night. Big Cat summed up the vibe on the timeline about as well as anyone.
The reaction to PCA's blast rippling through Barstool accounts in real time.
Then the Cardinals happened. St. Louis answered in the bottom half with a two-run walk-off double from Ivan Herrera that scored two and ended it, 3-2, before the Cubs could even finish celebrating. It's the kind of gut-punch loss that turns a highlight into a footnote — the box score doesn't care how far the ball traveled if you don't win the game.
The walk-off that flipped the entire game in a matter of minutes.
That's the whiplash of extra-inning baseball in a nutshell, and it's why Steven Cheah's timeline told the whole story in real time — from crowning PCA's MVP moment to a defeated 'Nevermind' a few tweets later once Herrera came through.
The immediate reaction once the Cardinals flipped the script on Chicago.
You can’t lose after that PCA HR. Horrific loss…
For the Cubs, it's a maddening pattern: their best player does something spectacular and the team finds a way to hand the game back anyway. For Crow-Armstrong individually, the season keeps trending in the right direction — 24 homers with two-plus months left is a real breakout year, walk-off losses notwithstanding. St. Louis, meanwhile, gets a much-needed jolt after grinding through a rough offensive stretch, snapping their slump in the ugliest, most satisfying way possible against a division rival.