Golf enthusiast Yoenis Cespedes has the great fortune of playing against Phillies pitching this week and he made the most of it tonight. Clay Buchholz started for Philly this evening and his troubles began immediately, as Cespedes crushed a bambinazo to bring in three runs before the Phillies had even recorded a single out.
Adam Morgan tried his luck against Cespedes in the fourth inning and gave up a solo dinger. Cespedes followed that one up with a huge shot to left field for his third home run of the game. He is now the only Mets player to record multiple three-homer games.
In the seventh inning, Cespedes doinked a ball off the center-field wall and had to settle for a mere double. According to Statcast, all four of Cespedes’s hits qualified as “barrels” and he produced the third-ever four-barrel game. As MLB defines it, a barrel denotes a ball struck at a certain velocity and launch angle that is expected to land for a hit:
The Barreled Ball classification is assigned to batted-ball events whose comparable hit types (in terms of exit velocity and launch angle) have historically led to a minimum .500 batting average and 1.500 slugging percentage.
Mathematically impressive as his night was, you don’t need a calculator to see that Cespedes mashed the Phillies to oblivion tonight.