CHICAGO (AP) — Matt Chapman joined some select San Francisco baseball company — including Willie Mays — with his massive day at the plate on Friday.
The 33-year-old third baseman hit his fourth career grand slam, a three-run homer and added a sacrifice fly to finish with a career-high eight RBIs in the Giants' 18-3 rout of the slumping Chicago Cubs. The eight RBIs tied the Giants' San Francisco-era individual game record, shared by five others. The first to do it after the team relocated from New York in 1958 was Mays in on April 30, 1961.
The other Giants to accomplish the feat were Orlando Cepeda (July 1961), Brandon Crawford (July 2019), Joc Pederson (May 2020) and Wilmer Flores (May 2025).
“I feel like I’ve been doing a good job with runners in scoring position and I’ve been having a lot of opportunities with guys on base,” said Chapman, in his 10th major league season and third with the Giants.
Chapman hit his slam in San Francisco’s six-run fourth — and in a light rain — off Edward Cabrera. It barely reached Wrigley Field’s left-center basket.
He added a sacrifice fly in the fifth.
Chapman’s second homer capped the Giants’ seven-run sixth inning. He launched Ethan Roberts’ down-the-middle sweeper and sent it 432 feet to left before it struck an electric ad sign above the bleachers.
Chapman's slam was the Giants' second in two days and sixth this season — all in San Francisco’s last 18 games. The Giants are the sixth team in MLB history to hit six slams in 20 days or less, according to the club.
Chapman said he has now homered in every major league ballpark after going deep twice at Wrigley.
“I got Sacramento (the Athletics' temporary home) in Triple-A, so we’ll count it,” he said. "But this was my last one, so that’s cool.”
Willy Adames and Casey Schmitt also each homered twice and Jonah Cox added a solo shot after entering as a pinch hitter. The Giants won their third straight with a 19-hit attack after getting 20 hits in a 12-9 win at Milwaukee on Thursday.
Chapman is up to four homers and 31 RBIs on the season with a .241 average. His best output was 36 homers and 91 RBIs with the Athletics in an All-Star 2019 season.
“I haven’t been doing anything different over the last week,” Chapman said. “We went to Milwaukee and I hit that home run (on Monday) and then got a few more hits yesterday, so I felt like I was starting to feel more comfortable in the box.
“I feel like I’m on time, getting good swings off and then today just showed up and just kept trying to repeat it and, you know, the power showed up a little bit."
Even so, San Francisco is still just 26-38 and deep in the NL West standings.
“We didn’t have many guys swinging the bat early and it seems like everybody’s kind of come alive at a similar time,” Chapman said. “The quality of at-bats have been really good."
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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/MLB
San Francisco Giants' Matt Chapman, right, celebrates with the Giants bat boy Carter Pierce after hitting a three-run home run, his second home run of the baseball game, in the sixth inning against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field, Friday, June 5, 2026, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Geoff Stellfox)
The San Francisco Giants' Matt Chapman celebrates in the dugout after hitting a grand slam during the fourth inning of a baseball game against the Chicago Cubs, Friday, June 5, 2026, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Geoff Stellfox)
PARIS (AP) — Bernadette Chirac, the steel-willed former first lady of France who spent 12 years at the Élysée Palace from 1995 to 2007 beside President Jacques Chirac while building her own political power in rural Corrèze and turning a children’s hospital charity into a national institution, has died. She was 93.
President Emmanuel Macron confirmed her death Saturday, saying he and his wife Brigitte had learned with “great sadness” of the passing of a woman who marked French history beside Jacques Chirac, who died in 2019, and changed the lives of millions of patients through her charitable work.
“A great lady of the heart has departed,” Macron said.
For more than half a century, Chirac was the fixed point in her late husband’s restless climb — through Parliament, two terms as prime minister, 18 years as mayor of Paris and, in 1995, the presidency.
She appears in the official photographs with her chin lifted, blond hair lacquered into place, a small handbag on her arm, looking less like a spouse than like an institution.
But the caricature never quite contained her.
The Chanel suits, dark glasses, nasal voice and withering judgments became part of the national image.
Beneath them was a relentless worker and a cold-eyed political operator who, almost alone among the wives of French presidents, built a base of power that was her own.
She was born Bernadette Thérèse Marie Chodron de Courcel on May 18, 1933, in Paris, into money, lineage and Catholic duty.
Her father’s family included soldiers, industrialists and diplomats; an uncle had served as an aide to Charles de Gaulle in wartime London.
But her life would be most marked by her time at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, where she met Jacques Chirac, a handsome and much-courted young man whose appetite for politics would come to define them both.
They married in March 1956. The union lasted 63 years and was, by her own account, a long lesson in endurance.
Jacques Chirac was famous for his warmth, appetite and instinctive connection with crowds. Bernadette’s gifts were different, observers said.
She was controlled, socially formidable, devout, exacting and sometimes devastatingly funny.
The Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton called her the “last queen of France,” and she did little to discourage the idea.
Her husband’s reputation as a womanizer was an open secret she chose, after much pain, to meet with dry humor.
Swarmed by photographers in Corrèze in 1998 — after rumors that Jacques Chirac had been unreachable the night Princess Diana died because he was with an actress — she stepped from her car and deadpanned: “Calm down. I’m not Claudia Cardinale. Or Lollobrigida.”
“At first, it was hard. I was very heartbroken, and then I got used to it,” she said years later in a television documentary.
“I told myself that was how things were and that I had to accept it with as much dignity as possible.”
Sent to tend her husband’s rural stronghold in Corrèze while he pursued power in Paris, she did far more than tend it. In 1971, she was elected municipal councilor in Sarran. In 1979, she became a general councilor in Corrèze and held the seat until 2015.
Her influence grew after Jacques Chirac became president in 1995. The role of first lady in France has no constitutional power, but she made the Élysée a place where her approval mattered.
She could be loyal, cutting and unforgiving, and understood that campaigns are made not only of speeches and polls but of debts, slights and resentments.
Yet she also carved out a space for female authority inside a male political culture that had little interest in sharing power — making it quietly clear that she would not be reduced to “the wife of.”
Her deepest grief stayed mostly private.
The Chiracs’ elder daughter, Laurence, developed severe anorexia after meningitis in adolescence and attempted suicide more than once. She never fully recovered and died in 2016 at 58.
That ordeal pushed Chirac toward the charitable work that reshaped her public image.
In 1994, she took over a medical charity that collected coins for children in hospitals. To millions of French viewers, the woman once mocked for hauteur became the face of hospitalized children and families living around hospital beds.
She continued running it until 2019, when she handed it to Brigitte Macron, the wife of France's current president, and became honorary president.
By then, she had long since become a political force in her own name.
“My husband no longer does politics, but I do,” she said to journalists, after Jacques Chirac left office in 2007.
She famously nicknamed Dominique de Villepin, the Élysée official she distrusted, “Nero,” yet also reportedly helped engineer her husband’s reconciliation with Nicolas Sarkozy, the former protégé who had betrayed him politically.
Her 2001 memoir, “Conversation,” written with journalist Patrick de Carolis, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and introduced the French to a franker, funnier and more independent woman than many had assumed.
After Jacques Chirac left the Élysée, his health declined and his public voice faded. Hers remained sharper for longer. Asked how he was, according to French media, she answered in her flat, unmistakable voice: “He keeps the dog.”
Age and grief eventually drew her out of public view.
By the time Jacques Chirac died in 2019, she was too fragile to take part in the public farewell where France and foreign leaders honored him.
FILE - Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy speaks with former first lady Bernadette Chirac during the inauguration of the Foundation Claude Pompidou, Centre teaching and research on Alzheimer's disease, Monday, March 10, 2014, in Nice, southeastern France. (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau, File)
FILE - French President Jacques Chirac and his wife Bernadette arrive at the airport in Hanover, Germany on Sunday, June 25, 2000. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer, File)
FILE - From left: Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair Bernadette Chirac, wife of French President Jacques Chirac, Lyudmila Putina, wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and First Lady Laura Bush, converse as they walk to a press conference site at the G-8 Summit on Sea Island, Ga., Wednesday, June 9, 2004. (AP Photo/Ric Feld, File)
FILE - French President Jacques Chirac, center left, and his wife First Lady Bernadette Chirac are surrounded by the crowd after addressing New Year wishes to the inhabitants of the region of Correze, in Tulle, southwestern France, Saturday, Jan. 14, 2006. (AP Photo/Bob Edme, File)
FILE - Bernadette Chirac, wife of former French President Jacques Chirac attends a ceremony to pay tribute to Simone Veil in the courtyard of the Invalides in Paris, France, Wednesday, July 5, 2017. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)
