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What a weekend we just had in baseball. We saw Jarren Duran steal home like Jackie Robinson. We saw the Giants win a game on a walk-off Little League home run.
But let’s take a second to appreciate Eugenio Suárez. Because Geno treated us to one of the rarest feats of all: a four-home run game.
See, until Saturday, there had only been 18 four-homer games in all of MLB history. Then Suárez made it 19 with four long balls against the Braves in Arizona — capped off by a game-tying home run in the bottom of the ninth to make history.
Suárez put up the first four-home run game in the Majors since 2017 (that one was also a D-backs slugger, J.D. Martinez), joining an exclusive list of hitters to accomplish the feat that includes greats like Carlos Delgado, Mike Schmidt, Willie Mays and Lou Gehrig … and goes all the way back to Bobby Lowe of the Boston Beaneaters, who had the very first one on May 30, 1894.
But we might not even give the four-homer game enough credit for just how rare it is.
Think about it. There have been even fewer four-homer games in MLB history than there’ve been perfect games in MLB history — 24 pitchers have thrown perfectos. And a perfect game is treated like the gold standard of baseball rare feats.
Meanwhile, home runs are everywhere these days. And there are 18 guys between the two lineups who have a chance to slug four of them every single game. Only the two starting pitchers have a chance to pitch a perfect game.
But there haven’t been nine times as many four-home run games as perfect games. Not even in recent history, with the rise of home runs and decline of complete games — since the Year 2000, there have been seven four-homer games … and eight perfect games. The scales just go the other way around.
Heck, Aaron Judge himself — who’s been slugging like Babe Ruth — had a chance at a four-homer game earlier this season and couldn’t do it. Judge stalled out on three home runs … even when he got to face a position player pitching in his last at-bat.
Suárez, at 33 the oldest player in MLB history to have a four-homer game, got it done facing the other team’s closer with the game on the line. That just makes one of the coolest things a hitter can do on a baseball field even cooler.
— David Adler
