Yastrzemski hits three homers in Giants’ win
PHOENIX – Chaos. Insanity. Launch angle. Baseball in 2019. It’s hard to know what to believe anymore when watching a sport where hitting a ball over the fence was once an accomplishment worth celebrating.
Up until this season, it would have been all-too-easy to write that surely, neither Giants manager Bruce Bochy nor Diamondbacks skipper Torey Lovullo had seen anything like what took place at Chase Field on Friday before.
Except two months ago, before Lovullo’s D’backs and Bochy’s Giants combined for 12 home runs in a 10-9, 11-inning Giants victory, Arizona played in the type of frenetic slugfest that’s becoming the norm around the major leagues.
The D’backs and Phillies combined for 13 home runs on June 10 of this season, so it’s not as if the record books need to be edited.
It might be impossible to say what’s special and what’s not in a sport where the balls are juiced and leaving parks at a record rate, but there’s no denying the significance of what Giants out
fielder Mike Yastrzemski accomplished on Friday.
With go-ahead home runs in the third and 11th innings against Arizona sandwiched around a tworun shot in the seventh inning, Yastrzemski became the first Giants player since Jarrett Parker (9/26/15) to homer three times in the same game.
The Giants blew a fiverun lead in the seventh and a two-run lead in the 10th, but reliever Trevor Gott put the finishing touches on his first career save after closer Will Smith reached his pitch limit with two outs in the 11th.
At the beginning of the night, Yastrzemski would have held the team lead at 16 home runs, but center fielder Kevin Pillar hit a pair of his own to set a new single-season career-high with 17 homers.
Pillar’s two-run shot in the fourth and go-ahead two-run home run in the top of the 10th helped him secure the fourth multihomer game of his career.