CHICAGO – Seiya Suzuki hit his 100th Major League Baseball home run as the Chicago Cubs demolished the San Diego Padres 23-3 on Wednesday for their fifth straight victory.<\/p>\n
Suzuki opened the scoring with his 13th homer of the season, a three-run shot that soared 426 feet (130 meters) over center field in the first inning at Wrigley Field.<\/p>\n
The Japanese outfielder finished 3-for-5 with three RBIs.<\/p>\n
Speaking after the game, the 31-year-old former Hiroshima Carp star reflected on making the leap to MLB ahead of the 2022 season.<\/p>\n
“Coming to a different country to play baseball was a major challenge, but I was able to keep striving for improvement,” Suzuki said.<\/p>\n
“My teammates and other people supported not just me but my family as well, creating an environment where I could focus on baseball with peace of mind. I am grateful to everyone around me.”<\/p>\n
Suzuki became the fourth Japanese player to amass 100 MLB home runs, following Hideki Matsui, Ichiro Suzuki and Shohei Ohtani.<\/p>\n
In other MLB action, Houston Astros starter Tatsuya Imai (5-4) was knocked out after 1-1\/3 innings in an 8-3 loss to the Minnesota Twins. The Japanese right-hander walked five and gave up five runs on four hits, including two home runs.<\/p>\n
Ohtani had his scheduled pitching start pushed back from Wednesday to Friday by the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were beaten 7-1 by the Athletics in West Sacramento. The two-way star went 0-for-5 at the plate at Sutter Health Park.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHICAGO – Seiya Suzuki hit his 100th Major League Baseball home run as the Chicago Cubs demolished the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":774167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":["post-774166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}