Clutch Cubs victorious on Alex Bregman blast, Pete Crow-Armstrong steal: ‘Good teams find ways to win’

Two outs. Two strikes. Two runs to get.

And Alex Bregman got ‘em.

The two-time World Series winner and $175 million Cubs signee hasn’t produced like he’s wanted to this season, but the ball he dropped into the basket for a game-tying home run Thursday probably made a lot of fans suddenly feel like he was worth every penny.

“That’s a huge hit. That means everything,” manager Craig Counsell said. “That’s one that takes an ‘L’ off the board and gets you a ‘W.’”

The third baseman’s bat is coming to life, and he could win over every North Side skeptic down the stretch of this pennant race, as the lights get brighter and his winning experience becomes all the more valuable.

But it will be difficult for him to come up with a bigger hit than this one, a down-to-their-last-strike homer in the bottom of the ninth inning that kept Thursday’s bout with the Blue Jays going long enough for the Cubs to score a 3-2 walk-off, extra-inning win.

“That’s who Alex Bregman is, man,” center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong said. “He’s shown people that he’s built for those moments. He just showed people again that that is where he belongs and where he thrives.”

Prior to the ninth inning, the Cubs did next to nothing offensively, smothered in seven scoreless innings by Jays righty Dylan Cease, who allowed just two singles and added 10 strikeouts to his AL-leading total.

But Crow-Armstrong led off the ninth with a base hit before Bregman’s basket-shot sparked extras, where Crow-Armstrong – serenaded with “M-V-P” chants – used his speed to steal third, force an errant throw and scamper home for the game-winning run.

Another walk-off win at Wrigley, the Cubs’ 11th of the season.

“That’s my style of play,” Crow-Armstrong said, “but we’re all getting to see me do a little bit of everything more often now.”

If Bregman is just starting to show that he’s the impact player the Cubs paid for – he’s hitting .370 with a 1.082 OPS in his last 11 games – then Crow-Armstrong is finding new ways to show what he’s been doing all season long.

A day after going back and forth with Dodgers two-way star Shohei Ohtani in a real-time MVP race, he showed again how capable he is of making an Ohtani-esque, multi-faceted impact, not just hitting at an elite level, not just playing elite defense, but putting pressure on the opposition with an elite base-running ability.

“It’s game-changing,” Bregman said of Crow-Armstrong’s impact on the base paths. “You walk him, it’s a double. He can steal third. He can score from first. He does it in every area of the game.”

“That’s why we’re talking about Pete so much,” Counsell said, “because it’s every facet of the game he can do it in. That’s just so rare in the game.”

Crow-Armstrong might be driving the bus as a legitimate threat to Ohtani’s grip on the MVP, and Bregman might end up the middle-of-the-order presence the Cubs hoped. But this team has looked so good this summer because it’s more than just one or two guys.

On a day when the bats fell silent until the last possible moment, it was pitching and the always-present defense keeping things close. Lefty starter David Peterson put a lot of guys on base but only allowed one run. The bullpen tossed six innings of one-run ball.

At the end of a home stand that threw the likes of Gerrit Cole, Max Fried, Tarik Skubal and Dylan Cease at these Cubs, they walked off Thursday to cap a stretch of games in which they definitively proved they could not just hang with the game’s best but beat them.

Maybe, as their record indicates, they’re one of the game’s best, too?

“Good teams find ways to win ballgames,” Bregman said. “We faced some of the best pitching in the world this home stand. I felt like our pitchers went toe to toe with them and our offense put together good at-bats.

“This home stand, we played good ball, just team ball all around in all the phases of the game.”