Crosstown rivalry gets spicy thanks to Pete Crow-Armstrong and fan

It mattered little to her — we’ll call her The Woman in White — that from where she and her friends were sitting in The Patio, the grass-level section beyond right-center field at Rate Field, she nearly had witnessed another catch for the ages by Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong.

For TWIW, this was not a moment made to celebrate greatness, but to taunt it. It was the whole reason she had planned to hold her engagement party in this spot, a young woman from Northwest Indiana who now lives in the city. She is a White Sox fan.

“Our goal the entire time we planned this,’’ she said, “was we knew PCA was in center field and we’re like, we’re going to heckle him at some point.’’

Her fiancé is a Cubs fan. He was the guy wearing the blue Cubs jersey. Evidently, he didn’t have a say in the planning.

Welcome to Ground Zero, literally, of the crosstown rivalry, 2026.

Crow-Armstrong once again had defied space and gravity and logic and leaped as high as he could against the center-field wall Sunday, in an attempt to take extra bases away from Sox slugger Miguel Vargas in the fifth inning.

“If Pete can’t catch that ball,’’ teammate Michael Conforto would say afterward, “there isn’t a center fielder alive who could.’’

The people who measure these things say there was zero chance of Crow-Armstrong making the catch. Crow-Armstrong has defied those odds before. Not this time.

“I missed the ball,’’ he said. “I don’t know, I have to watch the replays, but I missed the ball.’’

When he returned to earth, he wound up in a sitting position, facing the Patio, and remained there for a few moments. Because he had made contact with the wall, someone wondered if he had gotten shaken up on the play. That was not the case.

“That was me, processing the fact that I missed the ball,’’ he said.

He was not left alone with his thoughts for long. The Woman in White saw to that.

“Right when he was up at the fence, we’re like, ‘This is our prime opportunity, OK?’ ’’ she said. “So we just got booing him. I said he sucked, and then he said words that I don’t want to repeat, you shouldn’t say to a woman. And then both my brothers were up there against the fence, too.’’

And where was the fiancé, the Cubs fan?

“He tried to calm me,’’ she said, “but then he heard what PCA said to me, so he started booing him, too.’’

After the game, PCA acknowledged the exchange.

“Some lady decided to start talking [expletive], and [I decided] to say it back,’’ he said.

While one older member of the engagement party enthusiastically shared the full text of PCA’s reply — and, yes, not the type of thing you’ll hear on Marquee Sports Network — the Cubs fan decided that any further discussion was best avoided.

“Let’s call it,’’ he said to a visitor, making it clear no names would be shared. “This is more attention than we want to get out of this.’’

Fair enough. One added note: The wedding is still on for October 2027.

And so, too, is this rivalry, which held nearly 120,000 fans of both persuasions in thrall all weekend. Before the series, PCA greeted the rivalry with a figurative shrug. But that all changed Sunday.

The missed catch on the Vargas double was a mere footnote to the high drama of late-inning home runs: Tristan Peters’ three-run homer in the eighth to put the Sox ahead, Conforto’s three-run homer to answer in the ninth, Edgar Quero walking it off with a first-pitch, two-run homer off Cubs reliever Ryan Rolison in the 10th.

“A terrible feeling,’’ Rolison said.

But for the rivalry, new life.

“The electricity was unbelievable,’’ said Conforto, who has played in the Mets-Yankees and Dodgers-Giants rivalries and said this was comparable, with fewer F-bombs than in New York.

“We gave the city something to be excited about,’’ PCA said after packing his Caleb Williams Bears jersey into his duffel bag. “[The White Sox] got that fight in them, too. They were kind of up in our stuff all series. First game, they were just fighting. Yesterday, they came out swinging and made a lot of stuff happen.

“It’s fun playing against a young team like that. I feel like I can relate to a lot of those guys, and I appreciate how a lot of them play.

“So I mean, it’s a good ballclub, and they’re playing good baseball. So like I said, it’s good for the city. They’ve got two good teams going.’’