This story was excerpted from John Denton’s Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
Sitting in the lower bowl of Pittsburgh’s PNC Park and resembling a very confused fan with his baby blue Cardinals jersey and a black Pirates hat, Richard Palacios looked on with a seemingly frozen smile plastered across his face. He had very little to say, his son Richie Palacios said later.
The elder Palacios had just enjoyed possibly the greatest 59th birthday a father could ever experience. He watched his sons, Joshua and Richie, not only face off on the MLB stage but also thrive with impressive feats of brilliance.
Joshua, a Pirates outfielder, smashed a home run so long on Monday that it left the ballpark and nearly splashed into the nearby Allegheny River, and he logged a career-best five RBIs. Later, he would close out Pittsburgh's victory with a spectacular diving catch -- his latest web gem in a season packed full of them.
As is so often the case, little brother Richie had no intentions of letting Joshua outdo him. Richie, a center fielder for the Cardinals, came back a night later and smashed a 406-foot homer -- about nine feet longer than Joshua’s poke. But hey, who’s counting other than the highly competitive Palacios’ brothers, of course?
A day later, Richie kept the three-day family celebration going by lacing a 106.8 mph double down the right-field line for two more St. Louis runs. When the series ended, Richie had just a couple more hits with the Cardinals (eight) than RBIs (six). Not too bad of a start to a Cardinals career that had begun less than a week earlier.
Richard, who once had dreams of making it to the big leagues himself but never made it past Triple-A, sat in almost stunned silence at what he had just seen. Inside he was bursting with pride over the three-day hit bonanza that his sons had put on. Outwardly, all he showed was that wide smile.
“He didn’t have many worries and he was just sitting there smiling and saying how much he loved us,” Richie said, describing the brothers joining their father and mother, Lianne, after Tuesday night’s game. “And that was pretty much it. It’s just pretty cool to see your pops like that.”
When Richard could summon the words to describe the emotions of seeing his sons play simultaneously at the big league level, he described it to MLB.com’s Justice delos Santos:
“It’s been surreal. It’s a sense of fulfillment. A lot of times, in this game of baseball, you have no control of your future, in a sense. Others are judging whether you should go up or go down or go left or go right. What they can control is preparing themselves, working hard and leveraging the situation to where they can get an opportunity to show they belong. It’s a sense of joy that we can’t put into words. This is something that just doesn’t happen on the regular. This is such a historic occasion for our family and for baseball itself.”
How historic was what the Palacios brothers accomplished? They were the third set of brothers to homer in consecutive games as opponents in the Wild Card Era, joining Stephen & J.D. Drew (2007) and Jose & Javier Valentin (2003).
Years from now, regardless of how long the MLB careers of Richie and Joshua last, the Palacios family will always have this three-day series in Pittsburgh. They had played against one another in high school and Triple-A, and they played together in winter ball and for the Netherlands in the World Baseball Classic. But this was the big leagues. Both brothers homered, played starring roles for their teams in wins and even got to trot out the lineup cards in Tuesday’s game.
“The word I would say would be ‘surreal,’” Richie said. “Just being able to compete against my brother and seeing him out there doing his thing, it was just so awesome. We’re so happy that we were able to have this [series], and have our family here, and we’re hoping that it’s the first of many more to come.”