Wrigley Field turned into a soap opera Tuesday night. The Cubs and White Sox were locked in a tie game in the late innings of the Crosstown Classic when the tarp came out, and Barstool Chicago's crew had eyes on it in real time.
Tarp is on the field at Wrigley. The Crosstown Classic is heading into a delay with a tie ballgame in the bottom of the 8th. https://t.co/DKNEUlm13i
The delay stretched roughly 90 minutes and knocked White Sox reliever Grant Taylor out of the game, a break that mattered given what came next. Pete Crow-Armstrong had already gone deep on a leadoff homer for the second straight night, and when the White Sox got him to the plate again with the game on the line in the ninth, they chose not to test him. Steven Cheah summed it up on the ground: the Sox "walk PCA with the game on the line and a runner on 2nd with 1st base open," a lesson learned the hard way after Crow-Armstrong burned them the night before.
That set up Alex Bregman, who'd already tied the game at 3-3 with a hit earlier in the game, to finish the job. He slapped a two-out single up the middle in the ninth for a 4-3 win — the Cubs' second straight walk-off finish over their crosstown rivals and their 13th walk-off win at Wrigley this season, tops in the majors.
ALEX BREGMAN IS THE HERO THE CROSSTOWN CLASSIC ENDS IN WALKOFF FASHION FOR THE 2ND STRAIGHT NIGHT https://t.co/fWMRZO2vg4
On the other side of the field, White Sox Dave had to sit through it. He posted about getting jabbed on his way out of the ballpark by Cubs fans reveling in the win, writing there "were like 25 cubs fans that got their jabs in as I walked out and I couldn't do shit but eat em." It's the kind of moment that's turned him into a recurring character in this rivalry, for better or worse, as PCA keeps tormenting his team.
The Crow-Armstrong hype only grew from there. A day after the walk-off, Steven Cheah flagged that PCA had shot to -160 on DraftKings to win National League MVP, with Shohei Ohtani sliding out to +130 — a real, notable swing in the betting market off one hot week against the Sox.
But this rivalry doesn't let anyone celebrate for long. Just a day after Bregman's heroics, the White Sox turned around and shut the Cubs out at Wrigley, squaring the season series at 3-3 through six games. It's a reminder that the Crosstown Classic has been a genuine street fight all week, not a Cubs coronation, and the White Sox picked the perfect moment to remind everyone of that.
With the series knotted up, every remaining game carries extra weight for bragging rights on both sides of Chicago. Bregman's flair for the dramatic and Crow-Armstrong's MVP-caliber stretch give the Cubs the storylines, but a White Sox team that just snapped the walk-off streak clearly isn't ready to hand this rivalry over.