On July 29, 2026, the San Francisco Giants routed the Milwaukee Brewers 16-3 at home, and somewhere in the middle of that blowout, backup catcher Daniel Susac did something his first 45 big-league games hadn't managed even once: he hit a home run. Then, a few innings later, he hit another. By the final out, Susac had matched his entire season home run total from a single night's work.
Yesterday, across every hitter who played a game, the average player hit 0.08 home runs — meaning roughly one in twelve batters left the yard at all. Susac hit two, by himself, in the same game. That gap alone is striking, but the number that captures it precisely is a z-score of 6.64 against the full population of hitters who played that day. Z-scores above 4 already describe the kind of night that happens to a given player only once every several seasons; 6.64 sits well beyond that, in territory that shows up perhaps a handful of times across the entire league in a given year, if that. This wasn't just an above-average game — it's rated a 10 out of 10 on the severity scale we use for exactly this reason.
Baseball Savant doesn't have exit-velocity or launch-angle readings logged for either specific home run from this game, so there's no way to say definitively how hard he hit them or how far they traveled. What we do know: Susac entered the night with a .256 average, a .372 slugging percentage, and zero home runs through his first 45 games — a modest power profile for a 25-year-old rookie catcher. San Francisco built a 16-3 laugher, and games that lopsided typically mean a lineup is seeing more hittable pitches late as a bullpen works through its weaker arms, though there's no pitch-level data here to confirm exactly which Milwaukee pitchers he faced or in what counts. What's clear is that power largely absent through his first quarter-season showed up twice in the same nine innings.
Baseball Savant doesn't have exit-velocity or launch-angle readings logged for either specific home run from this game, so there's no way to say definitively how hard he hit them or how far they traveled. What we do know: Susac entered the night with a .256 average, a .372 slugging percentage, and zero home runs through his first 45 games — a modest power profile for a 25-year-old rookie catcher. San Francisco built a 16-3 laugher, and games that lopsided typically mean a lineup is seeing more hittable pitches late as a bullpen works through its weaker arms, though there's no pitch-level data here to confirm exactly which Milwaukee pitchers he faced or in what counts. What's clear is that power largely absent through his first quarter-season showed up twice in the same nine innings.
Susac entered the game with exactly zero home runs on the year. He left it with two — meaning literally 100% of his 2026 home run total was produced in a single game. That's an unusual way for a power season to start: not a gradual accumulation across months, but one night that instantly created his entire ledger. His overall line — .256/.306/.372, 19 RBI, 30 strikeouts in 45 games — still reads like a glove-first rookie catcher's season, not a slugger's. Whether July 29 marks the start of more power or simply a one-game spike inside an otherwise contact-oriented rookie year is genuinely unresolved.
The thing to watch over Susac's next 10-15 starts is simple: does he hit a third home run before the calendar turns to September? If he goes back to zero for extended stretches, this game reads as an isolated outlier inside a rookie catcher's development. If he starts running into pitches more regularly, July 29 may end up being the night his power numbers started catching up to his defensive reputation.
For one night in a 16-3 rout, a catcher who hadn't gone deep all year hit the ball out twice — and whatever comes next, his 2026 home run total will always trace back to a single game.