Chicago Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo has hit some prodigious home runs in his career, but his blast on Wednesday night against the Philadelphia Phillies may be in a class of its own.
Rizzo, who has 12 home runs and 34 RBI this season, stepped up to the plate with two runners on against Phillies starter Cole Irvin and launched a three-run homer that cleared the video board in right field, but not before doing some serious damage to a Budweiser billboard atop the board:
The Cubs, masters of social media, had the perfect caption for the video, saying that “Florida man vandalizes Wrigley Field video board,” mimicking a popular headline that stars Florida residents doing, well, interesting things.
From a baseball perspective, the home run measured 437 feet according to MLB’s Statcast software. The ball left Rizzo’s bat at 110.5 mph, the hardest hit ball of the game by either team.
The long ball was evocative of Kyle Schwarber’s mammoth blast in Game 4 of the 2015 National League Division Series at Wrigley Field, which landed on top of the video board in right field. Schwarber’s blast only (and we use that term lightly) travelled 419 feet, but it left his bat at a slightly faster speed, clocking in at 112.5 mph.
