CHICAGO (AP) — Add the St. Louis Cardinals' 3-0 victory over the Chicago Cubs on Saturday night to the list of classically weird happenings at Wrigley Field.
The game at the iconic North Side ballpark was delayed by fog for 15 minutes after the sixth inning. The Cardinals led 2-0 when play was stopped, then went on to win their third straight.
The crowd of 38,872 joined in singing John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” as the delay began. The early
1970s hit song has re-emerged during the World Cup soccer tournament, with U.S. players joining tens of thousands of fans in singing it at the end of matches.
The rare Saturday night game at Wrigley started an hour late due to rain, then fog billowed in from the north starting in the second inning and got denser.
The visibility became so poor that players said they would lose sight of the ball. They struggled and called out tracking fly balls, but there were no misplays.
“Yeah, that was brutal,” Cubs All-Star center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong said. "I've never seen anything like that so, I’ll just leave it at that. It was reminiscent of when like I was kid playing rec ball, soccer and stuff like that. Yes, you could see the ball hitting the bat, then not so much."
Crow-Armstrong, a Gold Glove winner last season, somehow caught Masyn Winn's deep fly for the second out of the sixth. He drifted to the edge of the warning track, then dropped to one knee to do it.
“I don't know how he saw my ball, to be honest with you,” Winn said. “When the ball was getting above the lights, I just thought it disappeared. I was crazy to me.”
Winn, the Cardinals shortstop, said he had a tough time seeing on the field.
“Right when they hit it, you could see kind of the direction of where the ball was going” Winn said. "And you know, as soon as it touched, like light level, it was gone. It was weird.
“At first I was like, ‘Oh this is pretty damn cool.' It felt like this was a sick game to play on July 4. But by the end of it, I was, like, ‘This is crazy.’ Nobody could see anything.”
Winn said Cardinals left fielder Lars Nootbar told him he couldn't see the hitters. Nootbar went on to catch Dansby Swanson's drive against the wall for the final out of the seventh after the fog subsided.
Nootbar said he thought Swanson's ball was headed to the stands for a two-run homer, but the wind that had pushed the fog into the ballpark kept Swanson's fly inside as well.
“I'm glad they didn't put more balls in the air, because we probably would have been in some trouble,” Winn said.
The umpires conferred with St. Louis manager Oliver Marmol and Chicago’s Craig Counsell after the sixth. Then the delay was announced on video boards as the result of “weather in the area.”
Marmol said it was the right call.
“There was a point there where no one on the field could see where the ball in play was,” Marmol said. "Thankfully we got a groundball to short with some punch-outs involved, because it would have been very circus-like otherwise.
“So good job pausing the game, letting (the fog) go through and then continuing, because that was different.”
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