When the Cubs’ offense is firing on all cylinders, the lineup is capable of a versatile attack featuring contact, patience, speed and power. That was on full display during the first month of the season and confusingly went missing for much of May and early June. On Friday afternoon, the North Siders once again had everything firing. The Cubs churned out seven runs in the first inning, powering their way to a 16-2 rout of the Blue Jays in the opener of a three-game set at Wrigley Field. Leadoff man Pete Crow-Armstrong reached base five times in the win and Carson Kelly authored the game-changing swing with a grand slam in the opening frame. “It’s who we are. Today was the definition of who we are,” Crow-Armstrong said. “Drawing walks against a guy who doesn’t walk people, mixed with hits and a homer. That’s exactly who we are. We put ourselves in really good opportunities today to hit with guys on and -- contrary to recently -- we made the most of those opportunities really well. It was a great day.” This marked the first time since Aug. 13, 1959, that the Cubs ended a single game with at least 11 walks, 16 runs and 18 hits. Needless to say, it was more than sufficient in backing another stellar start from Ben Brown, who lowered his season ERA to 1.85 behind six strong innings. A dominant narrative that has followed the Cubs over the past six weeks or so has been the team-wide issues with runners in scoring position. Heading into Friday’s game, the North Siders ranked second in baseball with 835 plate appearances in such scenarios, but were 28th in OPS (.682) with runners in scoring position. During Friday’s win, Chicago ended with a 10-for-24 showing with RISP. The volume of traffic created consistently -- even as the results were not showing for an extended period of time -- continued to be an aspect people around the team would point to as a sign of pending positive regression. “The runners in scoring in position stat that we had for a little bit while we were struggling,” Brown said, “for me and for mostly everyone here, I think we were able to look at that as a stat of like, ‘Look how close we are to scoring a lot of runs.’”
