Nine baseballs left Wrigley Field on Monday night like they had somewhere better to be. Four batters into the series opener against the Milwaukee Brewers, Tyrone Taylor put the first one in the seats. By the final out of a 17-3 thrashing, the Chicago Cubs had nine of them, a franchise record, and I sat there staring at the box score knowing exactly what it meant for September.
This was not a fluke night with a soft landing. This was a declaration. Alex Bregman hit three. Taylor, Nico Hoerner, Seiya Suzuki, Carson Kelly, Matt Shaw, and a Michael Conforto pinch-hit three-run shot filled out the rest. Five of those bombs came off Brewers starter Kyle Harrison before the fourth inning was done. Clay Holmes threw six scoreless for the Cubs and handed the lineup a blank canvas. The North Siders finished August with 62 home runs, an National League record for any calendar month and the second-most in MLB history behind only the 2019 Yankees.
I have watched power surges come and go in this league for decades. Most of them evaporate the second the calendar flips. This one has teeth.
Bregman Is Not Riding a Hot Streak. He Is Building a Case.
Let me tell you something about Alex Bregman. I have watched this man for years, through the Houston years and the free-agency questions and the early Chicago adjustment, and what he did in August is not noise. Two three-homer games in the same month. He became the first player since Adam Duvall in 2020 to pull that off. He and Pete Crow-Armstrong became the fourth set of teammates ever to each hit 12 or more in a single month, sharing company with Maris and Mantle.
Craig Counsell sees it clean. “He is relentless in his preparation and in his daily grind,” the Cubs manager said. “He just is relentless. This is who he is.”
Bregman himself refuses the hot-streak label. Earlier this month he put it plain: “I don’t feel like this is a hot stretch. I feel like this is who I am as a baseball player.” After Monday he added, “First two ever, so for sure, we’ll definitely remember it.” And on the month as a whole: “It was a good month and obviously driving the baseball up and down the lineup. I think just the quality of at-bat in the second half, it’s been super consistent up and down the lineup and it’s been tough on opposing teams.”
That is the language of a player who understands legacy. Three-homer nights are fun. Two of them in August, while your club is rewriting monthly power records and sitting on the first wild-card spot, those are the nights that get written into the second half of a career.
Stop Hand-Waving the Position Player. The Real Damage Came Earlier.
I already hear the dismissals. Three of the nine came off first baseman Andrew Vaughn, who was asked to cover two innings in a game that had long since stopped being competitive. Counsell even admitted the optics. “The position-player stuff gets a little ridiculous at the end there, honestly,” he said. Then he refused to apologize for the record. “That’s great we set a record. And the guys aren’t going to stop hitting. Guys are not going to stop hitting. They’re going to take advantage of it, and they should. They absolutely should. We’ll take it.”
Take the three off Vaughn out of the ledger and you still have six. You still have five off Harrison in the first four innings. You still have back-to-back sets from Taylor and Hoerner, then Suzuki and Bregman. You still have a Cubs offense that now leads the majors in slugging, on-base percentage, OPS, hits, home runs, walks, and runs scored. The franchise-record nine is the headline. The depth of the damage is the story.
Holmes felt it from the mound. “You could kind of feel their energy,” he said. “After a couple series that we lost, you could tell that the position-player group really wanted to come out strong. And you can feel that. To be able to put a zero up there in the first and kind of let them do their thing was nice.” Counsell framed the early attack the same way: “You make someone uncomfortable right away and you don’t let them settle in. Tyrone’s homer obviously did that.”
That is how you cut into a seven-game deficit. You do not wait for September. You put the division leader on the back foot in the first inning of the series and keep swinging until the bullpen is empty and the first baseman is on the mound.
Milwaukee Still Leads. The Assumption Is Gone.
The Brewers still own the best record in baseball and a seven-game cushion in the NL Central, with six meetings still packed into the next nine days. Pat Murphy is not interested in the aesthetics. “We’re not playing for run differential,” he said. “We’re playing to try and win as many games as we can.” Fair. Run differential did not win anyone a pennant.
But I am telling you what Monday changed. The Cubs, at 78-60, hold the first wild-card spot with Philadelphia, Arizona, and San Diego stacked behind them. Wins like this are not style points. They are oxygen. They are also a message to every front office still treating Chicago as a polite second-place club that will settle for October as a visitor. This lineup is first in the league in the categories that travel in October. Bregman and Crow-Armstrong just spent a month in Mantle-Maris territory. Counsell has the group convinced the work is not finished.
“We’re in a good place, absolutely,” Counsell said. “We’ve got a lot of fun ahead of us. We’ve got a lot of good things ahead of us. We’ve got a lot of challenges ahead of us. But, we’ve put ourselves in a really good position.”
Nine home runs will not win the division by themselves. Sixty-two in August will not hang a banner. What they do is strip the Brewers of the quiet assumption that the race was already settled. The Cubs just made Wrigley loud again on the last night of the month, and they did it with the kind of power that forces everyone else to adjust their plans. September starts with the baseballs still carrying.
