Powered by four home runs, the Chicago Cubs crushed the visiting St. Louis Cardinals 12-1 on Friday and moved closer to securing home-field advantage in next week’s National League wild-card series.
Chicago reduced its magic number to earn the top NL wild card to one. One more win by the Cubs (90-70) or one more defeat by San Diego (88-72) would mean the two teams would play their wild-card series in Chicago. The Padres won 7-4 against the Arizona Diamondbacks on Friday.
Colin Rea (11-7) allowed just two hits and a walk over 5 2/3 scoreless innings. The right-hander also struck out seven in earning his first win since Aug. 20.
The Cubs took full advantage of the wind blowing out to center field, with Nico Hoerner, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Michael Busch and Seiya Suzuki all going deep. Three of those blasts came off Miles Mikolas (8-11), who gave up six homers in a July 4 loss, also in Chicago.
Hoerner hit his seventh homer of the season with one out in the first. Crow-Armstrong followed in the fourth with a two-run shot. With his 30th homer of the season, to go along with 35 steals, he joined Sammy Sosa as the only Cubs players to join the 30-30 club.
Busch, who hit two of his three July 4 homers off Mikolas, made it 4-0 with his 32nd in the fifth.
Mikolas went five innings. He allowed four hits and a walk while striking out four.
Rea departed after giving up a two-out walk to Lars Nootbaar and a single from Ivan Herrera in the Cardinals’ sixth. Caleb Thielbar walked Alex Burleson to load the bases but got Nolan Arenado swinging to end the threat.
St. Louis (78-82) got on the board in the seventh. Nolan Gorman, who had two of the team’s five hits, led off with a double against Thielbar. Andrew Kittredge entered for the Cubs and Gorman scored on a Jordan Walker single.
The Cubs answered with a seven-run seventh highlighted by Suzuki’s grand slam off Chris Roycroft to make it 11-1. It was Suzuki’s 30th of the season, giving Chicago three players with 30 home runs for the first time since 2004 when they had four.
Ian Happ went 2-for-4 with a run and an RBI for the Cubs. Kyle Tucker, in his first game back after missing more than three weeks with a calf injury, went 1-for-4 and scored twice.
–Field Level Media
