San Francisco Giants outfielder Joc Pederson had himself a game after pregame conversations with Giants legend Barry Bonds, blasting 3 homeruns in the Giants 13-12 victory over the New York Mets on Tuesday night.
Pederson homered three times and drove in a career-high eight runs, and hit a game-tying single with two outs in the ninth inning in a wild game.
“Just getting knowledge from such a good hitter and the way he thinks about baseball and hitting, it just helped to connect some dots to free my mind up at the plate,” Pederson said (h/t ESPN). “I’m not ever going to be Barry Bonds; he’s the best hitter to touch a bat. But it definitely helped free my mind up in the box.”
Pederson, along with teammate LaMonte Wade, spent 30 minutes with Bonds in the Giants clubhouse prior to the game, and Pederson chatted with Bonds in a private office in a conversation that Pederson had to cut short.
“The next thing you know, it was like 6:25 p.m., and I was like, ‘I gotta go,”’ Pederson said.
“He was joking about it after his first one, about talking to Barry,” Giants starter Logan Webb said of Pederson’s homers. “Then he hit the second, then he hit the third, and it was like, man, this guy is something else. You’re not going to cheat him with anything. He’s trying to do that every at-bat.”
“He had a good night against us,” Mets manager Buck Showalter said of Pederson. “We missed a lot of locations with fastballs tonight. That’s not the way we’ve been doing it for the most part, so tonight was a challenge for us.”
“It was probably the best individual offensive performance that I’ve ever been around, considering all things like big moments in the game and the necessity to be resilient even in that last at-bat,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said.
