I'm a Mariners fan, so I've made peace with a certain amount of baseball suffering. Our whole thing is the 2-1 nail-biter where somebody strands the tying run at third in the ninth. We specialize in the close one. What we do not specialize in is watching a lineup decide, collectively, to turn the third inning into batting practice.
Which brings me to this week in Chicago.
Friday night the White Sox beat the Royals 22-1. I had to read it twice. They hung a 10-run third inning on Kansas City and just kept going from there, finishing with 23 hits and five home runs and a final score that looks like a typo. It was the most runs they've scored in a game since 1970 and the second-biggest margin in franchise history. On a random Friday, against a division opponent, at home.
Then, like they couldn't stand to be left out, the Cubs beat the Padres 23-3 over at Wrigley. Dansby Swanson hit a grand slam and drove in more runs than any Cub has in a single game since Sammy Sosa was doing it back in 2002. Twenty years, and it gets broken on a Wednesday afternoon.
Add it up, and that's 45 runs from two Chicago teams, both at home, both against teams that presumably showed up thinking they'd play a normal game of baseball. And somewhere in the back of my head is the thought that the Mariners have to go into that city eventually. Either side of town, I'm not picky about which one does me in. I just know Guaranteed Rate Field and Wrigley both apparently had the "runs" cheat code switched on this week, and I would love for someone to turn it off before we visit.
Now, the reasonable part of my brain knows this is a snapshot, not a trend. A 10-run inning usually means a bullpen fell apart and a few balls found grass at the worst possible time, and it snowballs. It happens to everybody. The Royals and Padres are good teams that caught a buzzsaw on the wrong night, and none of it necessarily says anything about how a series would actually go.
The problem is that the White Sox have quietly turned their home park into one of the best in the league this year, and the Cubs are, well, the Cubs. Neither of these is some fluke roster stumbling into a big number. When a bad team does this, you laugh. When a good team does it, you start pricing out therapy.
Anyway, congrats to Chicago. Genuinely. Watching a team put up 22 is a great time as long as it isn't happening to yours. I'll be over here hoping the Mariners' next trip lands on a night when both bullpens show up, and the wind is blowing in. Go M's. And please, keep it under double digits.