Baseball’s sweetest moments often arrive wrapped in cruel irony. Just ask anyone who witnessed Eugenio Suarez’s otherworldly performance at Chase Field last Saturday night — a display that somehow managed to be both transcendent and heartbreaking in the same breath.
The story? Four home runs. One night. And ultimately, a loss that stung like desert sand in the eyes.
Suarez, the 33-year-old Venezuelan veteran who’d been scuffling through a brutal .136 stretch over his previous 75 plate appearances, chose this particular evening to etch his name into baseball’s rarified air. The transformation from slumping slugger to hitting deity unfolded like some fever dream under the Arizona stars.
First came the solo shot in the second — nothing fancy, just a reminder that baseball’s pendulum swings both ways. The fourth inning brought another blast, this time with a runner aboard. By the sixth, when Suarez launched a titanic 443-foot missile that sent Braves hurler Grant Holmes to an early shower, the crowd had caught on. Something special was brewing in the desert air.
Then came the ninth.
Down but not out, Suarez stepped into the box one last time. The resulting moon shot to left field didn’t just tie the game at 7-7 — it sent Chase Field into the kind of frenzy usually reserved for October baseball. For a moment, it felt like magic might actually trump mathematics.
The baseball gods, though, have always had a peculiar sense of humor.
Here’s the kicker: Suarez became just the 19th player in MLB history to hit four homers in a single game. Weirdly enough, the last guy to pull off this feat? J.D. Martinez, who did it in these same Diamondbacks threads back in 2017. Something about that desert air, perhaps.
But statistics only tell half the story. Consider this: while Suarez was busy channeling his inner Roy Hobbs, the rest of Arizona’s lineup managed just three singles. All night. The baseball equivalent of bringing a Ferrari to a street race and watching your teammates show up on tricycles.
In the end, the D-backs fell 8-7 in extras — a gut punch that somehow made Suarez’s heroics feel both more impressive and more poignant. His season home run total jumped from six to ten, catapulting him to the MLB lead, but the W remained frustratingly out of reach.
For a guy with 282 career dingers and two previous three-homer games in his back pocket, this was different. This was the masterpiece. The night when everything clicked, even if the final score suggested otherwise.
Sometimes the box score lies. Sometimes the most meaningful victories don’t show up in the standings. And sometimes — just sometimes — baseball reminds us why we fell in love with it in the first place.
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