On July 21, 2026, the Colorado Rockies edged the Washington Nationals 8-7 in a one-run game that came down to nearly every swing. Nationals shortstop CJ Abrams supplied two of the biggest swings himself, hitting a pair of home runs in a losing effort — the kind of two-homer night that happens to almost nobody, let alone a middle infielder, on any given day in the majors.
Two home runs in one game sounds routine until you check what an average day at the ballpark actually looks like. Across every player who took the field on July 21, the league-wide average was just 0.13 home runs per player — meaning the overwhelming majority of hitters that day managed zero. Abrams' two-homer game produced a z-score of 5.19 relative to that day's population, a gap wide enough to sit beyond the range these comparisons usually even need. A z-score above 4 already describes something that happens only a handful of times a season across the entire league; 5.19 pushes into territory closer to once every several seasons.
The box score doesn't hand us exit velocity or launch angle on either specific home run — Statcast's per-homer tracking for this game isn't listed — so the how has to be pieced together from the season-long picture instead. Abrams enters with a .609 hard-hit rate this year, meaning more than six of every ten balls he puts in play leave the bat at 95 mph or harder. That's a profile built for exactly this kind of night: a hitter who doesn't need to perfectly square up a mistake pitch because so much of what he hits already qualifies as hard contact. Two of those well-struck balls finding the seats in the same game, against a Rockies staff at Coors Field, fits that profile even without pitch-by-pitch confirmation.
The box score doesn't hand us exit velocity or launch angle on either specific home run — Statcast's per-homer tracking for this game isn't listed — so the how has to be pieced together from the season-long picture instead. Abrams enters with a .609 hard-hit rate this year, meaning more than six of every ten balls he puts in play leave the bat at 95 mph or harder. That's a profile built for exactly this kind of night: a hitter who doesn't need to perfectly square up a mistake pitch because so much of what he hits already qualifies as hard contact. Two of those well-struck balls finding the seats in the same game, against a Rockies staff at Coors Field, fits that profile even without pitch-by-pitch confirmation.
Zoom out and this fits a season that's already a career year for Abrams. He came into 2026 as a .255 career hitter; through 99 games this year he's hitting .286 with a .903 OPS and 24 home runs — a total that's already nearly matching the per-season power output that produced 83 homers across his first four-plus big-league seasons. A shortstop slugging .544 is unusual on its own; adding a two-homer night to that ledger reads less like a spike and more like a continuation of where his season has already been trending. The part that keeps this from being a pure feel-good story: Washington still lost, 8-7, meaning even an outlier individual performance wasn't enough to outscore a Rockies lineup that matched him run for run.
The number worth tracking now is 24 — Abrams' home run total with roughly ten weeks left in the season. At his current pace over 99 games, a 30-homer season is realistic, which would put him within range of his first four-plus seasons of homers combined. Watch his hard-hit rate over the next couple weeks: if it holds anywhere near 60%, this two-homer night looks less like an aberration and more like a preview of what a shortstop this locked-in can do against any pitching staff, Coors Field or not.
Whatever happens next, July 21 already gave the Nationals one data point they can't get back: proof that when Abrams squares up, almost nothing in the box score can catch up to him.