Wrigley Field is used to weather shaping a game, but Saturday night offered something a little stranger: a 57-minute rain delay before first pitch, then a 15-minute fog stoppage between the bottom of the sixth and top of the seventh. In a ballpark already fading into cloud cover by the end of the sixth inning, the atmosphere became part of the story rather than just the backdrop.
The Cubs-Cardinals game eventually belonged to the Cardinals, who won 3-0, and the timing made the whole night feel even more unsettled. The fog did not just interrupt the rhythm of play; it also shut down the ABS challenge system, which meant the game was not only delayed by weather but temporarily disconnected from one of the sport’s newest layers of review. That is not a common sentence to write about a regular-season game, which is exactly why the scene stood out.
Imanaga was still the Cubs' anchor
Shota Imanaga was on the mound when the delay hit, and he had already done what he has done so often this season: give the Cubs a stable start in a rotation that has spent too much time pieced together around injuries and inconsistency. He worked 4 2/3 innings, allowed two runs, struck out eight and walked three. It was not his sharpest outing, but it did fit the larger pattern around him. Even on a night when the weather took over, Imanaga remained the pitcher Craig Counsell trusted to settle things down.
That trust matters because the Cubs have not had much of it elsewhere. Counsell has had to navigate limited starts and unavailable arms from Cade Horton, Justin Steele, Ben Brown, Matthew Boyd, Edward Cabrera and Jameson Taillon. In that context, the value of a pitcher who simply takes the ball every turn becomes more obvious. Counsell put it plainly: the staff keeps looking ahead to Imanaga’s day because it feels stable, and the Cubs have needed that all year. He added that what has made Imanaga so important is that he has made every start.
The numbers back up the point. Imanaga entered with a 4.28 ERA, a 1.10 WHIP and 26 walks, and this was his 18th start. None of that screams perfection, but it does tell the story of a rotation piece who has been hard to dislodge and hard for the Cubs to replace. When a team is searching for dependable innings, consistency can matter almost as much as dominance.
A strange night says something bigger
The fog delay itself was unusual enough, but it also underscored how much of baseball is about control that can vanish in a few minutes. One inning the ballpark was playable; the next, the center field scoreboard was only visible by squinting and the game was on hold. Pete Crow-Armstrong called it brutal and said he had never seen anything like it, which felt appropriate for a night that had already been stretched by rain before the fog arrived.
There is a broader Cubs point here, too. This was not just a weather story or a quirk of Wrigley Field. It was another reminder that the Cubs are asking Imanaga to carry a level of reliability that few others in the rotation have managed to match. If you want the larger context, it is the same conversation that has followed recent Cubs-Cardinals and Cubs series at Wrigley Field: who gives this team the cleanest path through the middle innings? On Saturday, the answer was still Imanaga, even if the game itself got swallowed by the weather before it could fully settle in.
In the end, the fog was the oddity, the delay was the disruption and the shutoff of ABS was the technical footnote. But the more meaningful takeaway was simpler: in a season full of uncertainty, the Cubs are still leaning on the one starter who keeps showing up.
