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San Francisco Chronicle​

‘Oh, my God, he did it again!' How A's rookie Nick Kurtz's historic night rocked baseball

WEST SACRAMENTO — In the 66th game of his big-league career, Nick Kurtz went 6-for-6. He hammered four homers. He drove in eight runs, scored six and collected a crazy 19 total bases, tying the all-time record. He's 22 years old, and the Sacramento A's first baseman is the first rookie to homer four times in one game. 'Every at-bat, I did something that I didn't expect to do, and then it just kept happening,' Kurtz said. ''Awe-inspiring' is the word that comes to mind,' A's DH Brent Rooker said of Kurtz's outrageous game Friday at Houston. 'The conversation in the dugout was like, 'It doesn't look like he's playing the same game as the rest of us are right now.' 'He's making it look so easy, and that night, those were quality pitches, guys weren't missing spots. It was amazing. It was impressive. Without a doubt, one of the greatest games in history.' Kurtz's extraordinary season is best measured by the Hall of Famers he's now connected to in the record books. For instance, his 43 extra-base hits in his first 67 games are second most after Joe DiMaggio's 48. The only other A's player with five or more hits in a game with three or more homers was Jimmie Foxx in 1932. Only 20 players have hit four homers in a game. Only nine have scored six runs in a game. Kurtz's Friday output is in the conversation for the best game ever by a hitter, along with Shawn Green's 6-for-6, four-homer game on May 23, 2002, and Shohei Ohtani's 6-for-6 game in September when he reached 50-50 in home runs and stolen bases for the season. 'Having a day like that that not many people have ever done, It's incredible,' said A's and former Giants catcher Austin Wynns. 'That's why it's history. History.' The Baseball Hall of Fame called and requested Kurtz's bat, which he was thrilled to donate. 'It's nuts,' Kurtz said. 'You'd never think about even saying the words 'Hall of Fame' in your rookie year. It's unbelievable.' All of baseball was abuzz Friday as Kurtz was piling up hits and homers, and his friends and family were locked in on every at-bat. Bill Cilento, Kurtz's college hitting coach, and Neil Avent, the scout who signed him, were texting each other throughout, and by the end of the night, Avent said, another A's scout, Rich Sparks, was relaying him real-time information by phone. 'He said, 'Nick's got a chance to hit four! ' and was telling me pitch by pitch what was happening,' said Avent, who was busy scouting the Cape Cod League. 'Then Sparksy said, 'Oh, my God, he did it again! '' By that point, Cilento, driving back to North Carolina from a recruiting event in Atlanta, was listening and watching on his phone as he drove, a no-no he'd never have contemplated except for the magnitude of the event. He wound up not seeing much anyway. 'My phone was just blowing up,' he said. Kurtz has won AL Player of the Week honors each of the past two weeks, he's likely to be the Player of the Month, and he's vaulted ahead of his teammate, All-Star shortstop Jacob Wilson, in the race for Rookie of the Year. 'We've talked about 'What if it's me? What if it's you? ' and we're just glad it's an A's player,' Kurtz said. 'It's a great thing for the franchise as a whole to have someone win that award. It's really cool. Either one of us (winning) is great and we'll be happy for each other.' Scouts rave about Kurtz's advanced approach at the plate, especially for a player drafted just a year ago, but the A's knew what they had; assistant general manager Billy Owens was telling people before this season that Kurtz would be the best player on the roster by August. Last July, the A's had Kurtz listed as the best player available, period, and were thrilled they could snare him with the fourth pick overall. 'There was almost nobody in our room that didn't agree this was the top guy on the board, and it started in January, before our draft meetings,' A's general manager David Forst said. 'We were all pretty bummed we didn't have the first pick, but we went around the room and said, 'If we did have the first pick, who would it be? ' And it was pretty much Nick.' Kurtz is from Lancaster, Pa., which is why he's known as 'Big Amish,' a nickname Max Schuemann gave him. 'With any nickname, you've got to lean into it,' said Kurtz, who started celebrating extra-base hits with a butter-churn motion — which meant an awful lot of churning Friday night. (He has actually churned butter, on a school trip. 'It's hard work,' he said.) He moved from Amish Country to Tennessee for his final two years of high school and then to North Carolina for college, playing at Wake Forest, a school with a strong program and an advanced sports lab, especially for baseball. Asked about Kurtz's quick adjustment to the big leagues less than a year after the draft, A's manager Mark Kotsay said, 'I think some of it has to do with his coaching at Wake; he really knows what he wants to do at the plate. He has an approach that he sticks with. 'He makes adjustments, pitch to pitch, and when you can do that and you're 22 years old, it's pretty special. The guys that I played with in my career that were able to do that are all Hall of Famers. Not to put Nick in that category yet, but he understands what a pitcher is trying to do to him.' A moment later, Kotsay dropped another Hall of Fame reference when asked whom Kurtz reminds him of. 'I mean, Jim Thome,' Kotsay said. 'Nick's that kind of a slugger, someone who can hit the ball to all parts of the field, but then take a walk or hit a line drive to left, and Thome could do that really, really well.' Perhaps the most surprising part of Kurtz's back story is that when he was in high school, he was a promising left-handed pitcher. At 6-foot-5, he also was an accomplished basketball player. Wake Forest was recruiting Kurtz as a pitcher when one day, Cilento got a call from Kurtz's father, Jeff, saying Kurtz had decided to focus just on hitting. 'I'll never forget it, I was at the beach with my family and Jeff called and said, 'Hey, I think we're going to put pitching down. If you guys don't want to recruit Nick now, we'll understand,'' Cilento said. 'But of course, we were all in at that point.' Kurtz had power already, but was a little prone to strikeouts. 'He had some swing-and-miss. We'd be telling tales if we said we knew what he was going to be today,' Cilento said. 'But even then, he always made good swing decisions, and what he did at Wake was to really hone his approach, figuring out that what he did really well was hitting to all fields. And he's always been completely unselfish. He'll take his walks, he'll move runners over. He never wants it to be about him.' Cilento takes no credit for Kurtz's hitting prowess, saying the A's suggestion that he move his hands out away from his body a bit had made the biggest difference. 'That gives him the space to do what he does,' Cilento said. The swing itself blows the A's veteran hitters away. 'Every kid can look at the highlights and see how everything is perfectly stacked,' Wynns said. 'Great position, good gather, smooth and just powerful.' 'He's hitting back-side homers at 108 mph, which is not a normal thing to do,' Rooker said. 'There are a handful of guys in the league that can do that. (Friday), he takes 97 at the top of the zone pull-side for a homer, then takes a splitter just off the plate away back-side for a homer. In the same game. Incredibly impressive.' Even more eye-popping, Rooker said, was Kurtz's walk-off homer off a slider from Houston's Josh Hader last month in Sacramento. 'No one hits that pitch from Hader,' Rooker said. 'He's made his whole living throwing that pitch. Nick hit it off the batter's eye in center. That's when I was like, 'OK, this kid might be different.'' With Kurtz, Wilson, Tyler Soderstrom, Shea Langeliers and Lawrence Butler, the A's have one of the best young groups of position players in the game. If they get some decent pitching, they could soon be back in one of their three- to four-year stretches of contention. 'These guys are superstars,' said Rooker, himself a two-time All-Star. 'The base is here for a very good team. These guys are all significantly better players than I am, and they're going to have better careers than I am.' 'I really like the group we have right now,' Forst said. 'Obviously, it's very position-player heavy, but it's a group that we've drafted and developed ourselves, which everybody here is taking a lot of pride in, and I think this is the foundation for the next playoff team. We still have a lot of work to do to get there, but there's a lot of optimism.'