After two straight defeats, the Chicago Cubs finished off their series against the Colorado Rockies with an emphatic blowout victory on Wednesday afternoon.
Javier Báez blasted his 17th home run of the season in the game, and Kyle Schwarber continued his torrid hitting with his 14th of the year in the victory. Schwarber drove in four runs, and Jason Heyward and Cole Hamels each contributed a pair of RBI to the Cubs cause.
Hamels also did his job well on the mound, throwing seven innings of shutout baseball and striking out nine batters to continue a great run of pitching in recent weeks.
Rockies starter Antonio Senzatela was roughed up for six earned runs and gave up eight runs total in the contest.
The Cubs got off to a blistering start in the game, scoring five runs in the second inning. Heyward smacked an RBI single to center field to score a pair of runs, and Schwarber launched a home run to right field to make it a 5-0 game.
From there, drama soon took hold, as Nolan Arenado was hit by a pitch from Hamels in the third inning. The incident came a day after Kris Bryant was hit by multiple pitches, and the Cubs star was absent from the lineup on Wednesday.
Arenado would ultimately leave the game, and the Cubs would continue to pile on the Rockies. They scored three more runs in the fifth as Hamels looped an RBI single into left field, and that would ultimately be all the support he would need in a shutout effort.
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In the top of the seventh inning, Hamels was hit by a pitch, and in the eighth Anthony Rizzo was plunked as well, prompting a warning to both benches. Báez then exacted some sweet revenge, launching a long home run to left field to push the Cubs into double digits on the scoreboard.
The win snapped a five-game road losing streak for the Cubs, and gave them a positive victory to build upon as they head into a tough road series against the Los Angeles Dodgers beginning on Thursday night. Jon Lester will face Clayton Kershaw in that game, which starts at 9:10 p.m.
