Athletics rookie Nick Kurtz pulled off one of the rarest feats in baseball Friday night in Houston when he hit four home runs in a single game, becoming just the 20th player in MLB history to do so. He is the second player this season to accomplish such a feat, along with Eugenio Suárez of the Diamondbacks back on April 26. Previously, this hadn’t happened since 2017 when Scooter Gennett and J.D. Martinez both did it.
Kurtz did so in a 15-3 A’s victory over the Astros.
Here’s Kurtz’s historic fourth shot of the game.
I might sound silly to say it like this, but Kurtz didn’t just hit the four homers, either. He went 6 for 6 with four homers, a double, six runs and eight RBI in the game.
Oddly, this is the first four-homer game from an American League player since Josh Hamilton did it May 8, 2012. There have been 13 four-homer games on the NL side, and this is the seventh in the AL, joining a list that includes the likes of Lou Gehrig, Rocky Colavito and Carlos Delgado. Kurtz is the first-ever A’s player to have a four-homer game.
The superlatives keep coming (all stats via baseball-reference.com’s Stathead):
- Kurtz is the first rookie to join the four-homer club.
- At 22 years old, Kurtz is the youngest player ever to record four homers in a game.
- He is only the second player on the list to have six hits in the game, along with Shawn Green on May 23, 2002.
- Kurtz is the sixth player to have at least four homers and eight RBI in the same game.
- If we put it all together, Kurtz is the first player ever with at least six hits, four homers and eight RBI in the same game.
- This was the eighth time in history an A’s player recorded six hits in a game, tying the franchise record. Kurtz is the youngest on the list, beating out Jimmie Foxx from 1930 by a little less than 100 days.
- This was only the ninth time an A’s player recorded at least eight RBI and, yes, Kurtz is again the youngest on that list. It does not, however, tie the franchise record. That belongs to Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, who drove home 10 runs on June 14, 1969.
- This was only the ninth time ever, for a player on any team, to score six runs in a single game. The last time was in 2004, when Joe Randa of the Royals scored six times. Once again, Kurtz is the only A’s player to have ever done this. Even Rickey Henderson never scored six times in a game.
This is most likely Kurtz’s career game — and as a rookie, no less. As can be seen above, this type of game almost never comes around for anyone. Having a huge game did not come from out of nowhere for this young slugger, though.
Kurtz has been on a heater for a while. The fourth overall pick out of Wake Forest in 2022, Kurtz entered the season as a top-40 prospect in baseball and joined the A’s to decent fanfare on April 23. It took him a second to get acclimated, as it generally does for rookie sluggers. He didn’t hit his first homer until his 17th game and didn’t hit his second until his 24th. If we start with that 24th game, May 20, however, and look at the stat line it jumps out that everything clicked for him.
Before May 20, Kurtz was hitting .208/.259/.299 with one homer and six RBI in 23 games. Since then, in 43 games, Kurtz is hitting .352 with an .870 slugging percentage, 16 doubles, a triple, 22 home runs, 53 RBI and 39 runs scored.
Kurtz’s line on the season is now .305/.374/.686. He’s short on at-bats in terms of qualifying for the batting title because he has 271 plate appearances on the season, and a player needs 3.1 per team game (329 right now would qualify him). He’ll get there. If he was qualified, he’d rank seventh in average, second to Aaron Judge in slugging and second, again to Judge, in OPS.
All the while, Kurtz has taken the AL Rookie of the Year race and made a mockery of it. His teammate, Jacob Wilson, who started the All-Star Game, was the odds-on favorite to win pretty much throughout the first half of the season. After Friday’s six-hit, four-homer explosion, Kurtz is now -2000 (per BetMGM) to win the award with Wilson slotted second at +800, and no one else has shorter odds than +2000.
All of this was the long way to say that while Kurtz’s Friday night onslaught is the seminal moment in turning heads, nationally, as to the amazing rookie season that Kurtz is having, he was already having a monster season.
And now he has produced one of the greatest individual performances in major-league history.