CHICAGO -- Michael Busch raised both arms skyward after rounding first base and was soon met on the field by his Cubs teammates, who poured out of the third-base dugout. The first baseman got the customary treatment: players pulling at his jersey, drenching him with water and soon jumping together in a mob scene.
It was Busch’s turn in the center of the celebration for a Chicago team that is making this sort of thing a habit. His walk-off single to deliver the Cubs’ 3-2 win over the Reds in 10 innings authored the team’s seventh straight victory overall, 13th consecutive win at Wrigley Field and the second night in a row with a walk-off party on the North Side.
The more the Cubs win in this fashion, the more the confidence in such comebacks grows.
“You just make yourself hard to beat,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “You develop this resilience and this hard-to-beat mentality. That’s what it creates, a belief system, like, ‘We’re down in the eighth. We’ve got a shot.’
“And it’s not always like that. Comebacks and late-inning stuff creates that. Sometimes you just need to see it to believe it. And I think this team is doing that.”
Cubs starter Jameson Taillon certainly believes it.
After he exited his outing with two outs in the sixth and watched Javier Assad escape the inning, Taillon said he posed a question to fellow pitchers Matthew Boyd and Colin Rea before ducking down the steps to the clubhouse. Chicago was trailing 2-0 at the time.
“I literally was like, ‘We’re going to win this game, aren’t we?’” Taillon said. “They were like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to win this game.’ Obviously, that’s not how it always works, but there is a real feeling and belief right now. Again, we’re just winning games in a lot of different ways, which is pretty cool.”
Combined with a relief corps that spun 4 1/3 shutout innings, Busch was the hero on Tuesday night with a game-tying homer in the eighth and then his walk-off hit up the middle in the 10th. The game-winning single eluded the glove of Reds shortstop Elly De La Cruz and scored Dansby Swanson from second base.
Michael Conforto was the hero one night earlier with a pinch-hit, walk-off homer off closer Emilio Pagán. The home winning streak dates back to April 12, when Carson Kelly came through with a walk-off single to beat the Pirates. During the streak, Chicago also has walk-offs from Swanson (10th-inning single against the Phillies on April 23) and Nico Hoerner (sacrifice fly in the 10th against the Mets on April 19).
Five walk-offs. Five different players.
“That’s a great representation of what we’ve been talking about,” Counsell said. “How much the bench guys have produced, and we can produce kind of up and down the lineup. That’s a cool stat. Absolutely. That’s a really cool stat.”
“That’s the quality of a really good baseball team,” Busch said. “It can be the whole lineup. It can be a few guys. Top, bottom, middle, pitching staff. That’s how you win a lot of games in this league.”
The North Siders have rattled off 17 wins in their last 20 games -- already piecing together two winning streaks longer than the season-high, five-game run in ‘25.
The 13-game winning streak at the Friendly Confines is the longest for the Cubs since a 14-game run from May 18-June 22, 2008. That previous streak is tied for the second-longest run at home for the franchise since it moved into Wrigley Field in 1914. The record is an 18-game streak in September of 1935. Per team historian Ed Hartig, the overall club record is a 21-game streak at Lakefront Park in 1880.
The Cubs have started this season 16-5 at home, marking the team’s best start at Wrigley Field since posting the same record out of the gates in 1985. This comes after Chicago posted a 50-31 showing at the Confines in the regular season last year, followed by a 4-1 showing between the National League Wild Card Series and Division Series.
Taillon has talked in the past about how he used to hate coming to play the Cubs on the road during his days as an opposing pitcher. The last great Chicago teams made it an unfriendly environment and knew how to lean into the old ballpark’s quirks.
Right now, this current version of the Cubs is replicating that experience in their own way.
“We’ve kind of picked up where we left off this year,” Taillon said. “It just seems like we’ve really found a way to make this an advantage. And obviously, fans coming alive in big situations -- some of these teams aren’t completely used to that, which we are. We’re spoiled. We get to play with it every night. It’s a real advantage.”