The Cubs had this one in their hands for seven innings, and then the game turned into a mess fast.
Chicago carried a 4-0 lead into the eighth in Arizona before the Diamondbacks stormed back for five runs over the final two innings and finished it off with a Ryan Waldschmidt two-run walk-off homer. What looked like a clean win behind Clay Holmes became a 5-4 loss that left the Cubs with more questions than answers about the bullpen.
Holmes gave the Cubs exactly what they needed from the front of the game. The 33-year-old sinker-baller worked seven innings of two-hit baseball, threw 93 pitches, and struck out five.
He leaned on his sinker 48 times and produced a 61.1 percent ground-ball rate, including 10 groundouts. His season ERA now sits at 2.26, and this was his third quality start in four outings.
It also marked his most strikeouts in a game since May 15.
The recent run from Holmes and Kevin Gausman has changed the look of this staff in a hurry. The Cubs have now gotten consecutive scoreless starts of seven or more innings from those two, the first time that’s happened since Jameson Taillon and Kyle Hendricks did it on Sept 27-28, 2024. That Hendricks outing was the last start he made for the Cubs.
That kind of starting pitching has been a welcome shift for a team that no longer looks like it’s patching the rotation together on the fly. Holmes is settling in, and a postseason rotation with Holmes, Gausman, and Matthew Boyd looks a whole lot sturdier than what the Cubs were carrying into last year’s playoffs.
Offensively, Chicago did enough to build a cushion. The Cubs out-hit Arizona 7-5 and were the only team doing much with runners on for most of the night.
The big swing came in the fourth inning, when Ian Happ launched a three-run homer off Brandon Pfaadt after an eight-pitch battle. That was Happ’s 23rd home run of the season, and he entered the game with a .859 OPS and two homers over his previous 10 games.
Michael Busch later added an RBI single after a Seiya Suzuki double, pushing the Cubs to a 4-0 lead in the sixth. They even loaded the bases in the seventh, but Suzuki flied out to center with two outs and that was the last real threat.
Four runs against Brandon Pfaadt should have been enough.
Instead, the eighth inning changed everything, and Daniel Palencia was right in the middle of it. Jacob Webb technically gets the loss and the blown save, his second in as many appearances, but Palencia’s outing was the one that cracked the game open. The right-hander had looked sharp in his return to the majors with two strikeouts against the Mariners on Saturday, but Arizona got to him this time.
Palencia hit Jordan Lawler, then walked Lars Nootbaar before Gabriel Moreno punched an RBI check-swing double into the inning. Geraldo Perdomo followed with a two-run parachute single over Pete Crow-Armstrong in center, and suddenly the Diamondbacks were within one. Palencia’s night ended there.
The contact against Palencia wasn’t loud, either. The two hits he allowed both came in under 90 mph exit velocity, with Moreno’s double coming off the bat at 62.1 mph and traveling just 28 feet.
Webb came in to try to close out a four-out save and escaped the eighth, but the ninth brought another threat. A one-out walk to Tim Tawa put the tying run on base, and Waldschmidt later came off the bench and crushed the game-ending homer.
It was another bad night for the Cubs at Chase Field, a ballpark that has given them plenty of problems lately. The pattern has been ugly: tonight’s 2-out, 2-run walk-off after leading 4-0 in the eighth, an eight-run eighth-inning collapse in 2025, a walk-off loss in 2024 after blowing a late lead, and a 13th-inning walk-off in 2023.
Craig Counsell said after the game that Palencia needs to throw more, and the Diamondbacks did catch a little luck on the two hits they got off him. Even so, Palencia still looks firmly outside Counsell’s circle of trust in the bullpen.
The Cubs will turn to Matthew Boyd in the rubber match before heading into a weekend series with the Reds. They need a win Wednesday to salvage a split on a six-game road trip that has already included too many walk-off losses.
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