Toward the end of May, I wrote about Pete Crow-Armstrong’s crimes of passion. When the Cubs win a game on a walk-off, Crow-Armstrong isn’t just the first one out onto the field to celebrate. He’s out on the field before the winning run has even scored. The game is still in progress, the ball is still in play, but there’s Crow-Armstrong sprinting across the third base line like a heat-seeking missile, breaking the rules and pulling the hero who just knocked in the game-winning run into the tightest hug imaginable. It’s a pattern; a jubilant, sensuous, illegal-but-not-actionable pattern that plays out over the rising strains of “Go Cubs Go.”
Well, in the past five weeks, the Cubs have walked off their opponents two more times, and Crow-Armstrong has not disappointed. In the bottom of the 10th inning on June 15, Ian Happ walked off the Pirates with a line drive single into right field. Crow-Armstrong was on deck at the time, which meant that he was busy warming up and thinking about hitting. It also meant that he was right next to home plate, so he ended up shadowing Vidal Bruján as he scored the winning run, and only then changing course and sprinting out onto the field to congratulate Happ. For these reasons, he didn’t actually enter the field of play until nearly a full second after the game had ended, but don’t worry. He was still the first Cub on the field and the first to wrap Happ in a big, shaggy hug. His love was so powerful that the energy surge temporarily overloaded the Marquee Sports broadcast system.
Once the video came back, of course, there was Crow-Armstrong holding on tight as Happ attempted to hop away.
The Cubs walked off the Guardians on July 3, once again in the bottom of the 10th. Matt Shaw came to the plate with one out and zombie runner Nico Hoerner on third base. Shaw drove the ball into center field, and although Lane Thomas had no trouble tracking it down, it was so deep that Hoerner tagged up easily. Rather than even try to nail the runner at the plate, Thomas just kept on jogging until the ivy took him.
Now let me show you where Crow-Armstrong was when the game actually ended. I had to sync up two video angles in order to locate the exact moment when Hoerner touched home plate, but it was worth the effort. Are you ready? No, you’re absolutely not. There’s no way you were ready for this.
Where was Crow-Armstrong when the game ended? He was very, very far onto the field. He was practically an honorary infielder. The circumstances are just a little bit extenuating here, because Hoerner slowed down and showboated for a second before he actually touched the plate, but that doesn’t mean the game wasn’t still going on! Crow-Armstrong had already passed the pitcher’s mound. What would have happened if Thomas had changed his mind, returned from the ghost world beyond the ivy, and tried to throw Hoerner out after all? Crow-Armstrong was practically in position to serve as the cutoff man.
We actually have the entire sequence from a camera that was focused solely on Crow-Armstrong, because where else would you want a camera operator to focus? Go ahead and get the full experience.
It would be hard to overstate how fully this moment belongs to Crow-Armstrong and no one else. He’s hopping over the wall. He’s the only one out there and he’s very much acting like he owns the space. Not only is he bounding along the third base line with Hoerner, but he’s also not all that far from colliding with him. Seriously. When you pause the tape it kind of looks like Crow-Armstrong is either trying to hop over him or attempting to invent a new kind of a piggyback ride.
When I say the moment belongs only to Crow-Armstrong, I really mean it. Look at this still from the flying chest bump he gave Shaw. Shaw just knocked in the winning run. He’s the hero. He won the game while Crow-Armstrong was (barely) in the dugout, and in a minute or so, Crow-Armstrong and Michael Busch will be dumping a cooler full of water onto his head. But let me ask you something. Which one of these two guys looks happier?
Shaw looks like a guy who just walked-off the Guardians. He’s very happy. As for Crow-Armstrong, I’m having trouble even conjuring up a hypothetical scenario where someone would look as completely overtaken by joy as he does in this moment. He’s ebullient. He’s exploding. He looks like a doctor injected him with a big syringe of pure dopamine at the exact same moment that he won the lottery and the Super Bowl and tasted chocolate for the first time. I imagine this is what it looks like when someone actually dies from happiness.
So that’s the good news. Pete Crow-Armstrong has to read FanGraphs, and he must have taken particular notice of the part where I explained that the rules pretty much guarantee that he wouldn’t get into any trouble if he kept running onto the field before the game was actually over. That’s the only logical explanation for the fact that he’s now trespassing harder than ever.
Before we go, we should probably address one more celebration. This is actually just for a regular old home run. What’s weird is that although the Marquee crew keeps a camera trained on Crow-Armstrong whenever there’s a chance that he’s going to celebrate a walk-off, it has started deliberately cutting away from his home run celebration. He homered twice yesterday. Marquee didn’t show the celebration either time. In fact, it’s been weeks since the local broadcast showed Crow-Armstrong celebrate a home run of his own. But Apple TV broadcast Chicago’s Fourth of July game, in which Crow-Armstrong also homered twice, and nobody in Cupertino got the memo. See if you can spot the subtle reason that Marquee has decided to find something, anything else to put on the screen while Crow-Armstrong and Seiya Suzuki celebrate a home run.
Yeah, maybe it’s not so subtle after all. Marquee Sports Network has made the decision that Cubs fans don’t need to see Suzuki and Crow-Armstrong leaping in the air and, well, I’m really trying to avoid the phrase “bumping uglies” here, so let’s just call it “combining forces.” It turns out that you can clink both glasses and cups.
Suzuki and Crow-Armstrong have spoken to reporters about the special bond they’ve formed as teammates, and I’d say that really comes across. They’re practically joined at the groin. “With Pete, my hidden personality was able to come out,” Suzuki told ESPN’s Karl Ravech through an interpreter on Sunday. “There is no necessary language for certain emotions,” said Crow-Armstrong. Cubs fans deserve the chance to watch the two stars speaking in their own particular love language. The last time Marquee showed the beast with two fronts on camera was June 8 – that’s eight home runs and more than a month ago – and they only did so because they figured out a tasteful, seemingly Austin Powers-inspired mode of censorship.
That’s right, they filmed the celebration through the slit between the back and the seat of a bench. At the moment of impact, all you can see are two belts becoming one. This is a missed opportunity. Rather than obscuring this joyous outpouring of emotion by filming it through furniture, the Cubs should be putting it front and center, beaming it into every home in the greater Chicago area. My only real concern is that this seems like an awfully high-risk maneuver for two players who are absolutely crucial to the Cubs’ postseason dreams. The degree of difficulty here is off the charts. I worry about hamstrings when they take off. I worry about groins and obliques when they collide in mid-air, and I worry about ankles and knees when they land. I would feel much better if Suzuki and Crow-Armstrong could find a way to execute their docking maneuver at sea level. Regardless, I don’t think they should stop, and not just because it’s fun. I think we also need to consider the possibility that combining forces with Suzuki, or even just the motivation to do so, is what has been fueling Crow-Armstrong’s recent success at the plate. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that he really loves to celebrate.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com