Kris Byrant Gives Cubs Fans Some In-House Drama Against Brewers

The normal kind of drama is pretty much gone from the Chicago Cubs' regular season. They sit 13 games clear of their nearest competition in the National League Central, and five games above the second-winningest team in baseball, all but assured of prime postseason position. The suspense that remains is all in-house. Chicago's brigade of four starting pitchers with sub-3.0 ERAs still has to sort out who will end up having the best year, and the hitters at the heart of the Cubs' order, Kris Byrant and Anthony Rizzo, are continuing a season-long game of one-upmanship that could very well decide the National League MVP race.

Thursday afternoon against the Milwaukee Brewers, Bryant offered his latest salvo, going five for five with a double and two homers, driving in five of the Cubs' nine runs. On a sunny day at Wrigley Field, it was as casual and pleasant a display of dominance as you're likely to see, a batting-practice showoff session carried over to game time. After giving up a first-inning single on a heater, Milwaukee starter Zach Davies spent the middle innings hanging breaking balls to Bryant, which the second-year third baseman obligingly thumped: high over the left-field wall in the third and hard into the left-field corner in the fourth. The Brewers' relief corps switched tacks, testing Bryant with inside fastballs; he walloped these, too, for a center-field solo shot and a game-capping RBI single.

It was, somehow, only the second most impressive outing of Bryant's year—back in June, in Cincinnati, he went five for five with three homers—but it got to the heart of the late-summer vibes in Chicago. Cubs fans have nothing to do but wait for October, and Cubs players have nothing to do but try to make it fun for them. Displays like Thursday's come with undercurrents of worry: What if it all dries up when it counts? In this regard, Bryant makes for a fitting stand-in for the team as a whole: prodigious and young, a sure thing now who might look like a kid on primetime TV in a couple months.

There are few feelings more recognizable to fans than that of the nervousness that comes with a big lead. It works on the scale of a single game, when a lone opposing run seems like an omen of a furious comeback, and on that of a season. The reset of the postseason amplifies the worry, all those banked wins suddenly swept away as promos proclaim the real season starts NOW.

All anyone can do in the meantime, player and partisan alike, is try to enjoy the show, and on Thursday Bryant impressed a crowd that has gotten used to impressive things. After the game, Cubs manager Joe Maddon answered what has become the standard question: Who is his MVP pick? With characteristic playfulness, Maddon said, "They share one name. Bryzzo. Maybe Bryzzo can be named MVP. Who knows?" The T-shirt vendors around Wrigley surely set to work officializing the coinage.