Chicago Cubs at Pittsburgh Pirates: Final Score & Recap

The Chicago Cubs routed the Pittsburgh Pirates 11-0 at PNC Park on July 25, 2026, a game in which the DiamondIQ model entered with a 48 percent home win probability for Pittsburgh and watched it collapse entirely to zero. The Cubs were held scoreless through four innings before breaking the game open decisively in the fifth and sixth, outscoring the Pirates 8-0 across those two frames alone. Chicago finished with 16 hits against Pittsburgh's 5, and both teams committed an error in what was otherwise a dominant, wire-to-wire performance from the Cubs' pitching staff.

The pivotal sequence arrived in the top of the fifth against Paul Skenes, when Pete Crow-Armstrong delivered a double that swung the win probability 15.6 percent in Chicago's favor, followed immediately by a Seiya Suzuki single that added another 14.9 percent. The Cubs pushed three runs across in that inning to break the scoreless tie, then returned in the sixth for five more, with Dansby Swanson adding a double off Isaac Mattson worth 7.4 percent in win probability. An earlier Suzuki strikeout in the third had briefly checked a Cubs rally, costing 6.7 percent, but a Miguel Amaya hit by pitch off Skenes in that same frame had generated 8.8 percent on its own, foreshadowing the damage to come.

Amaya and Swanson each finished as the top performers by WPA, each posting plus-14.6 percent for the game, while Crow-Armstrong contributed plus-10.3 percent alongside a game-high plus-3.7 RE24, reflecting his outsized run-environment impact. On the mound, Shota Imanaga was the clear anchor with plus-20.1 percent WPA, providing the pitching backbone for the shutout as Javier Assad and Tyler Callihan completed the game without further probability movement. The model's lean throughout the final innings remained firmly with Chicago, where it had arrived and stayed from the fifth inning on.