If Eugenio Suárez had his preference, he might have chosen a different day to hit four home runs in a game. But given that he entered Saturday's game batting .167 for the season, he was in no position to be picky. To his credit, neither he nor the Arizona Diamondbacks are so ungracious.
At least not out loud, anyway. If Suárez had his choice, he wouldn't have done it on the same day as Shedeur Sanders to the Browns, or the eight NBA and NHL playoff games which crowded him out of the place a four-homer performance normally affords. Oh well. It's the performance, not the stage.
Suárez went deep in the second, fourth, sixth and ninth innings of Saturday's 8-7 loss to Atlanta, and yes, he did indeed hit four homers in a game his team lost. Three of the four traveled more than 400 feet, and the shortest was a still-impressive 383 and tied the game in the bottom of the ninth, so he didn't cheapjack his way to notoriety. Suárez hit the first three off Braves starter Grant Holmes, and the last off Raisel Iglesias.
It's the last at-bat that stands out, because Suárez had been so bereft of results despite playing every inning of nearly every game so far. He has been the prototypical two-true-outcomes player, those being homers (10) and strikeouts (30), with a batting average safely tucked in the .150 range for much of the season. A lot of good players have struggled this year for various reasons, but Suárez has been Arizona's six-hitter on almost every lineup card as manager Torey Lovullo has either waited patiently for him to snap out of his funk or doesn't have a legitimate alternative at third base. Probably the latter.
But Suárez can still put a ball in the air even with a withered slash line, and that'll keep him regularly engaged on what can be considered a decent team in a very good division. Under normal circumstances, like Atlanta being ahead or behind by two or more runs, he might not have gotten that fourth crack at it. With a one-run lead, the Braves' closer was loath to allow the leadoff hitter to reach first base, even though said hitter had touched all the other bases in every one of his previous at-bats. Tactically, a case can be made that Atlanta would have been better served by making rookies Jorge Barrosa or Tim Tawa beat them instead. It's a bit of a coin flip, but the Braves have started the season in poor fashion and needed the win just for a morale boost.
The essence of baseball in many ways is figuring out how to keep a guy from making history at your expense, and Atlanta failed to do that last night. The other 18 four-homer guys, from Bobby Lowe in 1894 to J.D. Martinez in 2017, had mostly played on teams who scored double-digit runs or won the game. Suárez performed his feat almost entirely without his teammates' aid; the D-Backs managed only three other singles all day.
But that's something else about the essence of baseball: There are 2,430 regular-season games every year, give or take the odd rainout, so one single game can pale in significance over a moment like yesterday's. The fans in Phoenix, as well as his largely inert teammates, got a memory that Game 27 would not have normally provided, and Suárez joined Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt, Lou Gehrig, Ed Delahanty and our beloved Scooter Gennett as either Hall of Famers or Scooter Gennett to hit four bombs in a game.
I mean, Suárez is no Shedeur Sanders being condemned to the Browns, but fame comes in mysterious ways. Some people hit four homers in a defeat, and others sit around for two days waiting for Roger Goodell's backup Dawn Aponte to say their name into a microphone.
