Nick Kurtz's historic 4-HR barrage is latest proof that he's slugging his way into AL Rookie of the Year race

Yahoo

4 days ago

For the first time in his young career, 22-year-old first baseman Nick Kurtz was named AL Player of the Week on Monday after his highly productive showing in the Athletics' first series of the second half vs. Cleveland.
With the All-Star festivities having put a pause on the regular season, this award, doled out weekly by the league office, didn't cover the usual sample of six or seven games played over a week. Instead, it highlighted just the first weekend after the break. And in that abbreviated sample, Kurtz mashed to an outstanding degree, collecting multiple hits in all three games at Progressive Field, including five of the extra-base variety.
On the surface, it's a modest accomplishment for the rookie first baseman, the first official accolade in a career that promises to feature plenty more. At the same time, 'player of the week' wholly undersells what Kurtz has been doing at the plate lately. Because he was not just the star of this past week(end). He has been the best hitter in baseball for the past nine weeks.
He put the baseball world on further notice Friday with a historic night at the plate when he became the first rookie in MLB history to homer four times in a game against the Houston Astros. He went 6-for-6 with 8 RBI and 19 total bases.
Neither Aaron Judge nor Cal Raleigh nor Ronald Acuña Jr. nor Kurtz's NL Player of the Week counterpart, red-hot trade candidate Eugenio Suárez, has been as dominant with the bat as the A's rookie since the end of May. Over a 42-game stretch that didn't include Friday's historic night, Kurtz was hitting .327/.408/.782 with 18 home runs, good for a 1.190 OPS and 217 wRC+ that were both tops in baseball.
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'I think Nick's put himself, in a very short time, in conversation about Rookie of the Year,' A's manager Mark Kotsay said in Cleveland. 'We've got one on the team right now that's probably a little ahead of him in Jacob [Wilson]. But it's fun to watch these two, and it's going to be fun to watch them over the next 64 games and the progress they're able to make.'
Indeed, Wilson's marvelous first half, which led to him starting the All-Star Game at shortstop for the AL, has somewhat overshadowed Kurtz's prolonged hot streak. But make no mistake: Both are succeeding to a degree achieved by very few rookie hitters as they emerge as one of the most promising young position-player duos in baseball.
'Nick, he's still learning the league,' Kotsay said. 'Jacob got a little head start on him.
'But Nick seems to be a quick learner.'
'Now it's go time'
Three weeks of torching Triple-A pitching earned Kurtz his big-league call-up on April 23, roughly nine months after he was selected fourth overall in the 2024 MLB Draft. It wasn't smooth sailing at first: After he hit his first home run on May 13, Kurtz fell into an 0-for-21 skid that plummeted his OPS to a paltry .558.
But Kurtz didn't panic. And those who observed how he went about his business in the earliest days of his big-league tenure were unsurprised when he began to not just dig himself out of that hole but also flourish in spectacular fashion upon finding his footing.
'He had to go through some struggles, like everybody does, and he didn't press,' A's hitting coach Chris Cron said. 'It wasn't a major deal. Of course he wanted to do well, but it wasn't the end of the world.'
'When you come billed with the kind of power he came with, to not be able to tap into that readily and immediately, I think you would see some guys start to scramble,' former A's pitcher and current broadcaster Dallas Braden said. 'Instead, what he did was cut the swing down and spray the baseball all over the yard until he got comfortable to a point where he could dip back into that power pool.'
It took some time for Kurtz to tweak his patented patient approach, which he mastered as an amateur, to fit the unique challenge of hitting major-league pitching.
'If you wait for your pitch, you're probably striking out on three pitches,' he said. 'It's all about adjusting on the fly and pitch-to-pitch. Some guys, you need to be aggressive on pitches that aren't necessarily your pitch. When I first got up, I was trying to be a little too patient. Being down 0-1, 0-2, 1-2 so much … this game is so hard.'
Kurtz realized early on that he needed to take control of his at-bats, rather than letting the opposing pitcher dictate the terms of engagement. And behind the scenes, he was making adjustments to allow his strengths to manifest against more daunting competition.
'His ability just to communicate what he's trying to do, understand the information that we're throwing out there — that doesn't just happen with a snap of the finger,' Cron said. 'You tell him something, he can absorb, and he can apply. Application of the information is the hardest thing to grasp, and he does that.'
Said All-Star teammate Brent Rooker: 'To have as high-level approaches as he has as a 22-year-old, and then to also go out and execute them and execute them with the power that he does … That makes him stand out.'
Soon enough, Kurtz began to better understand when to unleash his thunderous left-handed swing — 'It's about playing the game and the situations,' he said — and the results followed.
'Once he found himself in 2-0, 2-1s, 3-0, 3-1s,' Braden said, 'now it's go time.'
With that, Kurtz took off. On May 20, he snapped his hitless skid with a single and a home run against the Angels. Two more homers followed the next day. A strained left hip flexor put Kurtz on the injured list later that week and threatened to derail his newfound momentum, but the brief injury scare was no trouble. It took just one minor-league rehab game — he homered, of course — before Kurtz rejoined the A's lineup and resumed raking.
'It's kind of what you dream about'
As the home runs kept coming, each seismic swing seemed to carry greater weight than the last: A go-ahead blast off Royals closer Carlos Estévez in the top of the ninth in Kansas City. Two walk-off homers against the Astros off elite relievers in Bryan Abreu and Josh Hader. A titanic, three-run shot in Detroit — the only home run ball to reach the shrubbery beyond the center-field wall at Comerica Park this season — that provided the only runs in a 3-0 victory over the Tigers. And that magical Friday night against the Astros.
Whether in pregame batting practice or in high-stakes battles against some of the best pitchers on the planet, the power that was promised during Kurtz's brief time as a prospect has consistently been on display this season. Most remarkably, Kurtz's ability to clear the fence from foul pole to foul pole is nearly unrivaled; only Judge has hit more home runs to the opposite field or to straightaway center since the start of June.
And when Kurtz is going good, the homers tend to come in bunches. It happened last spring, when he hit 14 homers in a 10-game span after a cold start to his junior season at Wake Forest. It happened before his call-up this year, when he hit seven homers across 12 games in Triple-A. Now it's happening at the highest level, with a five-homers-in-six-games run in June and a seven-homers-in-13-games stretch in July.
Kurtz did his best to describe what it's like to be so locked in: "It's probably one of the best feelings, knowing when you're up there — honestly, it doesn't matter whether you get a hit or not — but I know what I'm feeling in my swing, I know exactly where [the bat] is going. I'm seeing the ball — it's huge right now. It's kind of what you dream about.'
"It amazes me,' said Rooker, who was also a first-round pick out of college but didn't blossom into an impact big-league bat until his age-28 season. 'I was a very, very good college player. And if you had thrown me in the big leagues at 22, I would've absolutely had no chance.'
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'I don't think people realize how difficult that is'
Rooker's more gradual development only increases his appreciation for how Kurtz and Wilson have hit the ground running as rookies.
'Their ability to just jump right in and have success immediately and adjust as quickly as they have, I don't think people realize how difficult that is,' he said.
Adding to the unique dynamic of this unrivaled rookie duo is how drastically different they are as players. Wilson is a skinny, right-handed shortstop who thrives on a hyper-aggressive approach and succeeds thanks to his nearly unparalleled bat-to-ball skills. Kurtz is a gargantuan, left-handed first baseman who whiffs often but pulverizes the ball so frequently that the punchouts are entirely tolerable.
'I don't think there's one way, from a hitting standpoint, to tell somebody how to do it,' Kotsay said. 'Jacob has his unique style. He's a bat-to-ball guy that puts it in play and sometimes seems to have a magic wand where he can hit it where he wants to. I played with a guy like that — Tony Gwynn — who had that magic wand.
'And for Nick, when he touches it, he impacts the baseball, and he can leave anywhere in the yard. They're definitely two different styles of hitters, but they have an advanced approach for how young they are in knowing who they are and knowing what they're trying to do.'
Said Wilson of his counterpart: 'When we drafted him, it was obviously a huge bat for us to go out and get, and as you can see, it's translating to the big-league level pretty nicely right now. Definitely happy to have him on the team, excited to hopefully play with him for a very long time.'
Kurtz's and Wilson's Baseball Savant pages are opposites to a spectacular degree, a fitting reflection of each player leaning all the way in on what he does best. To Rooker, this is a great sign.
"The key to having success here is knowing what you're good at and then just being as good as you possibly can be at those things,' he said. 'Everybody here is doing something at an elite level. ... You have to figure out what that thing is, and you have to be as good as you possibly can at that. There's a ton of value, obviously, in trying to improve your weaknesses. [But] I think there's more value in finding your superpower and doing that as well as you possibly can. And I think those two guys are perfect examples of that.'
'Yes ... I'm a big leaguer'
For as impressive of a start to his career as Kurtz has had, he knows this is just the beginning. "I put zero expectations on myself in Year 1,' he said. 'I had no idea what I was getting into.'
He also will not stay this hot forever; another round of adjustments is surely in store, a regression to reality that will put his advanced aptitude to the test once again. And for the Athletics as a whole — a franchise in a transition between cities, with an inexperienced yet ascendent roster still figuring out how to translate talent into victories — every game is another opportunity to grow together.
'That's the best part about what we've developed here with some of those young guys — they're coming up together,' Cron said. 'And these two guys, Jacob, with his lineage, with his dad playing [in the big leagues], he's been around the game. The maturity of Nick Kurtz is off the charts. Physically, they're not the same, but they have this mindset of, 'Yes,' — without being braggadocious —'I'm a big leaguer.' And there's nothing that really fazes either one of them.'
Veterans such as Rooker will continue to play a critical role in these young players' development, and Kurtz is quick to credit the A's DH, as well as the recently released Seth Brown. But Kurtz also knows that the franchise's future depends on his generation becoming the driving force behind the team's success.
'We might not all know the answers,' he said, 'but we're in it together, and we're gonna figure it out.'