Joshua Baez Homered in His First Three Career At-Bats. Nobody Had Ever Done That

Joshua Baez homered on the first pitch he saw in the major leagues, 449 feet to dead center over the batter's eye at Wrigley Field, and then he did it twice more. Second at-bat, out to left. Third at-bat, out to right. No player in the history of the sport had homered in each of his first three career at-bats.

The three fields are the detail that separates this from a hot afternoon. A hitter who gets pull-happy and runs into three mistakes has had a great day. A hitter who goes center, then left, then right has taken what each pitcher gave him and hit it out anyway, which is a different skill and a much harder one to fake for an afternoon. He is 6-foot-3 and 220 pounds, and the first one cleared the deepest part of the park on the first pitch he ever saw, before anyone had shown him anything.

He finished 3-for-4 with five RBI. The Cardinals won 8-4, and his five were most of it.

Now the necessary caution, and it is not a formality. Three at-bats is three at-bats. The list of players who arrived with a thunderclap and settled into ordinary careers is long, and every one of those debuts also looked like the start of something at the time. Pitchers had no book on him on Saturday. They will by the weekend, and the honest version of this story ends with a question mark rather than a projection.

What survives the caution is that the record is permanent. It does not matter what he hits in September or whether he is still in the league in four years. First three career at-bats, three home runs, and in more than a century of professional baseball nobody else has done it. That sentence is now fixed, and it belongs to a rookie who walked into Wrigley on a Saturday afternoon and swung at the first pitch.

The projections can wait. Saturday was the best debut anyone has had.