Three plate appearances, three home runs
Called up from Triple-A Memphis on Saturday, Joshua Baez played his first Major League game last night. He walked away with a stat line that had never appeared in the modern baseball record books: a home run in each of his first three plate appearances.
The first came on the very first pitch of his career, thrown by Matthew Boyd, and travelled 449 feet into the left-center-field bleachers at Wrigley Field. The second flew down the left-field line. The third went the other way. The 23-year-old outfielder finished 3 for 4 with five runs batted in, and St. Louis beat the Cubs 8-4.
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A record the league itself qualifies
MLB confirmed the feat as a first in the modern era of baseball, while noting it cannot make any claim about the period before 1901 because complete scorecards are missing. In other words: nobody had done it for 125 years, and nobody can swear nobody did it before that.
The distinction matters, because it says plenty about how rare this was. Three-homer debuts do exist in the archives, but always spread across a full game, with outs in between. Three plate appearances, three balls sent out of the park, nothing missed in between: that uninterrupted run is what sets it apart.
Why the manner matters
One detail gets lost in the raw number. Baez did not repeat the same swing in the same spot three times. Left-center, left field line, then the other way. Three different routes, against different pitches, in a ballpark where the wind often decides the night. That makes the simple explanation of hot streak a bit harder to sell.
And then comes the hard part, because baseball is brutal with flashy debuts. St. Louis, in a late-season stretch where every game matters, now has a decision to make about the playing time of a player who spent the year in Memphis. The answer will not come for several weeks. The line is already in the books.
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