On September 11, 2026, the Chicago White Sox fell to the St. Louis Cardinals 7-3, a game that swung further away as the innings went on. But before the deficit piled up, White Sox second baseman Chase Meidroth turned in the kind of night his season stat line gives no hint of: two home runs, in a single game, from a hitter who has barely squared a ball up all year.
Start with the plain math. Across every game played on September 11, 2026, the average MLB hitter combined for 0.128 home runs — barely an eighth of a homer per player, since most hitters go deep zero times on any given day. Meidroth hit two. That performance produced a z-score of 5.39 against that day's league-wide distribution, a number so far outside the normal range that it effectively describes an event, not a tendency. Z-scores above 4 typically show up once every several seasons across the entire sport — not once a week, not once a month, but a handful of times total across a multi-year stretch. Meidroth's two-homer night sits in that territory. To be clear, two-homer games happen regularly around the league; what makes this one statistically extreme is who did it, given how far it strayed from his own established pattern of contact.
Here's where the picture gets murkier, and it's worth being honest about the gaps. Statcast hasn't logged exit velocity or launch angle for either home run — the box score confirms two balls left the yard, but the underlying batted-ball data for this specific game isn't available. What we do have is his season-long shape: a hard-hit rate of 61.2%, meaning more than three in five of his batted balls this year have cleared the 95 mph threshold analysts use to define solid contact. Set against that is a barrel rate of roughly 0.09% — barrels require exit velocity and launch angle to line up together, and by that measure Meidroth has produced almost none all season. That combination describes a hitter who squares up the ball consistently but rarely at the angle that turns contact into power. Two home runs in one night either means he found that angle twice in a single game, or two fly balls carried further than his season's pattern would suggest. Without this game's Statcast readings, there's no way to say which.
Here's where the picture gets murkier, and it's worth being honest about the gaps. Statcast hasn't logged exit velocity or launch angle for either home run — the box score confirms two balls left the yard, but the underlying batted-ball data for this specific game isn't available. What we do have is his season-long shape: a hard-hit rate of 61.2%, meaning more than three in five of his batted balls this year have cleared the 95 mph threshold analysts use to define solid contact. Set against that is a barrel rate of roughly 0.09% — barrels require exit velocity and launch angle to line up together, and by that measure Meidroth has produced almost none all season. That combination describes a hitter who squares up the ball consistently but rarely at the angle that turns contact into power. Two home runs in one night either means he found that angle twice in a single game, or two fly balls carried further than his season's pattern would suggest. Without this game's Statcast readings, there's no way to say which.
Zoom out and the surprise makes more sense. Meidroth is in his second big-league season, a 25-year-old second baseman who has built his .269 average and .747 OPS this year on contact and on-base skills — a .345 OBP — rather than power. Fourteen home runs across 141 games is a modest total for a September push, and his career total sits at 19 home runs over 263 games. Two homers in one night account for roughly a tenth of everything he's hit out of a ballpark since debuting in 2025. That's the real anomaly here: not that a hitter went deep twice, which happens across MLB most nights, but that it happened to a player whose season-long profile — high contact rate, near-zero barrel rate — points in almost the opposite direction.
The next few games are the real test. If Meidroth's barrel rate — essentially flat at 0.09% all season — ticks up over his next 10 games, that's a sign something mechanical shifted, whether a swing adjustment or a stretch of favorable pitch selection. If it snaps back toward that same near-zero baseline, September 11 was simply two fly balls that carried on a good night, not a new pattern. Watch specifically whether his fly-ball rate on contact climbs in the games ahead, and whether Chicago's lineup starts pitching around him any differently.
Either way, the White Sox got a rare glimpse of what Meidroth's ceiling looks like if the power ever catches up to the contact.