The Cubs couldn’t have asked for a better way to kick off their four-game set with the Brewers. In front of a sold-out Wrigley Field crowd on the final day of August, Chicago blew past Milwaukee 17-3 and did it with the kind of night that can reset a clubhouse in a hurry: nine home runs, six scoreless innings from Clay Holmes, and a statement win over the team sitting atop the NL Central.
That result mattered even before the first pitch. Chicago came in having dropped seven of its last 10, while the Brewers arrived with an eight-game division cushion.
None of that showed up once the game started. The Cubs came out swinging and kept right on going until they had set a franchise record for home runs in a single game.
The power surge came from all over the lineup. Tyrone Taylor launched his 11th homer of the season, Nico Hoerner followed with his eighth, Seiya Suzuki added his 24th, Carson Kelly hit his 10th, Matt Shaw went deep for his fifth, Michael Conforto homered for the 13th time, and Alex Bregman stole the show with a three-homer night that pushed him to 23 on the season.
For Taylor, the two-run blast was his first homer as a Cub and his first since Aug. 1.
Hoerner’s shot made it back-to-back home runs in the first inning, and he’s now just two away from matching his single-season career high of 10. Bregman’s third homer of the night came off Brewers first baseman Andrew Vaughn, and it was his second three-homer game of the year.
He became the first Cub with multiple three-homer games in a season since Aramis Ramirez in 2004.
The Cubs’ barrage didn’t just rewrite their own record book. It also pushed them to 62 home runs in August, tying the NL mark set by the Atlanta Braves in 2023. Chicago now leads MLB with 195 home runs overall.
While the offense was putting on a show, Holmes quietly turned in the kind of outing that gets overlooked when the scoreboard looks like that. The deadline pickup from the New York Mets struck out eight over six shutout innings and has now allowed just one earned run in his last four starts. Since joining the Cubs, he owns a 1.96 ERA in 29 innings.
Chicago needed every bit of that efficiency because Milwaukee made a strange pitching decision once the game got out of hand. Manager Pat Murphy pulled a real pitcher in the seventh and handed the ball to Andrew Vaughn, a first baseman, to finish the game on the mound. Vaughn wound up working two innings and gave up seven earned runs on nine hits, with three home runs and three walks.
The move was legal, and it let the Brewers preserve their bullpen for the rest of the series. Chad Patrick threw 1.1 innings and DL Hall covered one frame, which meant Vaughn actually logged more innings than either Milwaukee reliever who appeared Monday.
The Cubs only had to use Ryan Rolison and Colin Rea to close things out after Holmes’ start, so both teams should still have some pitching left for the next three games. For one night, though, Chicago owned everything about this series opener.
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Brewers Playoff Pitching Outlook Just Got More Concerning With Kyle Harrison
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The latest reminder came against the Cubs, when Harrison was tagged for nine earned runs in 3 innings as Chicago took advantage of the softer velocity and some pitch tipping. For a Brewers team trying to sort out its playoff pitching picture, that kind of outing is more than a bad night - it raises fresh questions about whether Harrison can get back to the version of himself that made him look so useful in the first place. [Read more 🡒]