MILWAUKEE – The contact made a sickening thwack as it hit Brewers closer Trevor Megill’s throwing arm, a sound that could be heard from the stands.

The Cubs’ Mike Tauchman had hit a line drive comebacker to lead off the 10th inning, with Luis Vázquez on second base as the automatic runner. Megill, clearly hurt, dropped his glove and jogged toward the sideline. And the ball sat in the grass in front of the mound.

“I was just aggressive,” Vázquez said through team interpreter Fredy Quevedo Jr. “I didn’t stop, and I just made sure that I was safe.”

His eyes trained on the ball, Vázquez sprinted home to give the Cubs a lead and kicked off an extra-innings rally.

“Just good court awareness, so to speak,” manager Craig Counsell said after the Cubs’ 6-3 win against the Brewers on Tuesday. “And that made a difference. “You’ve got a run on the board after one hitter.”

For a while, the Cubs seemed to be falling back into a concerning pattern. As they’ve struggled this month, there have been plenty of games in which the starting pitcher kept the team in the game, but the offense failed to deliver. But on Tuesday, they flipped the narrative in the 10th inning.

Rookie Ben Brown held the Brewers hitless through seven innings. It was both the deepest he’d gone into a game and the first time he’d recorded 10 strikeouts.

“It was like an angry fastball,” Counsell said. “It was just really good, it was overpowering for much of the game.”

The closest the Brewers came to recording a hit off him came with one out in the seventh. Willy Adames hit a long fly ball, but Cubs center fielder Cody Bellinger robbed him of a home run.

Brown applauded Bellinger from the mound and then recorded his tenth strikeout of the night to put a bow on his start.

“I think that did a good job of limiting uncompetitive misses,” Brown said, his ten-strikeout ball in his back pocket. “Not particularly in the fifth inning, but in all the other innings, I think I did a really good job of limiting those misses that just take guys out of the count. So that was cool to see that.’

The Cubs gave Brown a one-run lead in the third inning, on a solo home run from Michael Busch.

They didn’t score again until the tenth, when Tauchman drove in Vázquez. Then Seiya Suzuki and Bellinger had back-to back singles, Nick Madrigal put down a sacrifice bunt, and Ian Happ hit a two-run double. The Cubs took a comfortable lead.

Entering Tuesday, the Cubs were hitting a MLB-worst .189 with runners in scoring position in May – quite the contrast to April, when the Cubs were hitting .269 with runners in scoring position, good for No. 9 in MLB.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what will ignite a rally. Just like it’s hard to know what can get a team out of an offensive rut.

“Hopefully soon we’ll start turning it around,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said before the game. “Maybe it’s a big game, maybe it’s a few balls falling in, whatever it is to have it click. And then I think we’ll start scoring runs again.”

Maybe this game will do it, or maybe the Cubs will keep looking for answers.

“I think one of the hardest aspects of all of these jobs is, you want to be patient with guys with track records, and you know that you’re going to have these struggles during certain times, and you want to be patient,” Hoyer said “But you can take that patience too far. At some point, you have to have a sense of urgency there, and trying to figure out when that timing is really difficult.”