Baez Crushes Three Homers as Cardinals Rout Cubs 8-4
Joshua Baez went 3-for-4 with three home runs and five RBI, single-handedly dismantling the Cubs on Saturday. Michael McGreevy backed him up with six shutout innings, and St. Louis walked away with an 8-4 win.
The Cardinals wasted no time. In the first inning, a Burleson fielder's choice plated Wetherholt, and then Baez launched a 449-foot shot to center that made it 3-0 before Chicago had even settled in. Colin Rea held things together for two innings, but the Cubs were already in a hole. Then came the moment that flipped the game on its head: Conforto unloaded a three-run homer to right in the second, scoring Hoerner and Ramirez to tie it at 3-3. The win probability swung from 35% to 65% in Chicago's favor on that single swing — the biggest momentum shift of the night, and for a moment, it looked like the Cubs had stolen the narrative entirely.
They hadn't. Baez answered in the fourth with a solo shot to left, 382 feet, to put St. Louis back in front 4-3. When Matthew Boyd took over for Chicago in relief, the Cardinals treated him like batting practice. Baez struck again in the sixth — his third homer of the night, 368 feet to right, scoring Burleson to make it 6-3. Blaze Jordan followed immediately with a 408-foot blast to left center, and just like that it was 7-3. Boyd finished the night having allowed 7 earned runs in 5.1 innings, and the story of the night was that St. Louis didn't just beat Chicago — they buried them in a two-inning stretch that was never really in doubt after it started.
Burleson added a 403-foot solo shot to left center in the eighth to push the lead to 8-3, capping a night in which he scored three runs despite going 1-for-3. A late Chicago run scored on a Bregman double-play grounder in the bottom of the eighth — Suzuki crossing the plate — but it was cosmetic. McGreevy's line tells the real story on the pitching side: six innings, five hits, zero earned runs, six strikeouts. He gave St. Louis exactly what they needed while Baez did the rest. Three home runs, five RBI, three runs scored — it appears Baez was simply in a different gear than everyone else on the field tonight.