Peralta sets club record with 4 doubles

PHOENIX -- When D-backs right fielder David Peralta motored around first base in the eighth inning of Saturday night's 11-5 drubbing of the Dodgers, he said there was no thought about setting a club record with his fourth double of the game.
Peralta was simply doing what he does best -- go all out.
"To be honest, no, I swear I didn't know about that," said Peralta, the left-handed hitter who was 4-for-5 with three runs scored. "It's just the way I play. I like to play hard for my team and myself. I mean, I saw the ground ball and I thought I had a pretty good chance to make it to second and be in scoring position for [Paul Goldschmidt]."
Robbie Ray, who started and won the game even though he was knocked out in the sixth inning after allowing all five Dodgers runs on nine hits, said a lot of Peralta's teammates knew.
"I was up here in the clubhouse and I heard about it on the TV," Ray said. "So guys on our bench were well aware of what was going on."
It was a night of records, as the D-backs set another one by winning for the eighth time in their first nine home games. The franchise's previous best start at home was in 2008.

Peralta, a lefty hitter batting second, said he figured it all out as he stood on second base in the midst of a tumult at Chase Field, having stretched what might normally have been a single to right-center into his fourth double.
"I heard everybody screaming and I saw it on the scoreboard video screen," he said. "It was good. It was good to be a part of something like that."
Four doubles certainly aren't as rare as four homers in a game, but take all this into account:
The last Major Leaguer to smack four doubles in a game was Brock Holt, for the Red Sox at Fenway Park against the Rays on June 1, 2014. The last National Leaguer to do it was Jeff Baker of the Rockies, at Wrigley Field against the Cubs on May 30, 2008.
Right now, it's all in a day's work.
The D-backs head into the finale of this three-game series against the four-time defending division winners at 12-7 and only a half-game behind the first-place Rockies. They are doing it with a sizzling offense -- a Major League-leading 103 runs scored and the third-best team batting average, at .268.
At home, the D-backs are hitting .327 with 72 runs scored and 67 RBIs, all at the top of the class.
On Saturday, they had five doubles and four homers. The top five hitters in the lineup had 10 of the club's 14 hits in 22 at-bats, scored nine runs and had nine RBIs.
As tenacious as Peralta's baserunning might have been on his eighth-inning double, his best piece of hitting came on his third double, leading off the seventh. It was against the shift, with the Dodgers infield and outfield swept all the way around toward right.
Peralta simply went with the pitch and lined it to left field, which was a virtual no-man's land.
"I just let the ball get deep [in the zone] and used my hands," he said. "It's not easy to do, when you see that huge hole between third and short. You don't want to start thinking about that, because you can get in some bad habits trying to drive the ball over there. Still, it feels good to beat the shift."
It all feels good for the D-backs right now.