WEST SACRAMENTO -- Still reeling from a season-high sixth loss in a row on Monday night, Athletics manager Mark Kotsay offered a solution for his young team to break out of such a rut.
“To get out of a grind, it takes a big performance,” Kotsay said. “You look for someone to kind of maybe put the team on their back and carry them through.”
Towering at 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds, Nick Kurtz is built to shoulder a heavier load than most. The A’s No. 1 prospect and No. 14 overall prospect in baseball per MLB Pipeline certainly delivered a herculean effort on Wednesday night, launching a pair of majestic home runs for his first multi-homer game in the Majors.
It wasn’t enough.
The issue was that both of Kurtz’s big flies were solo shots. On a night when a total distance of 2,541 feet worth of homers were hit at Sutter Health Park, those two runs were outweighed by the four home runs hit by the Angels in Wednesday’s 10-5 loss.
Still, as the A’s search for positives in what is now a season-high eight-game losing streak, Kurtz’s breakout is a bright takeaway. After going homerless until his 17th game to begin his Major League career, the slugging first baseman has now homered three times over the past two days.
“Great night,” Kotsay said of Kurtz’s performance. “After punchouts in the first two at-bats, to continue to stay focused and take those at-bats showed a lot of maturity on his part.
“We talk a lot about this kid continuing to learn how to be a big leaguer. Two days ago, he was asking a couple of guys, ‘Hey, what’s the routine here? This is a lot of games.’ He’s playing a lot of games and there’s no days off. For him to have a good night, that’s a great sign.”
Kurtz was enduring a 0-for-21 streak at the plate before snapping it on Tuesday with a second-inning single. Over that period, the A’s had identified that pitchers were attacking him with strikes early and often, taking advantage of the 22-year-old’s patient approach that was touted in his rise through the system. To combat the issue, they encouraged more aggressiveness to avoid quickly falling behind in counts.
On Wednesday, Kurtz pounced on a first-pitch changeup low in the zone from Angels starter Jack Kochanowicz and golfed it out for a 435-foot blast in the fifth that struck the scoreboard in right-center. Two innings later, Kurtz tagged a 1-2 fastball from Shaun Anderson for a 431-foot homer that bounced high off the batter’s eye in center.
“I’ve been getting behind way too early and getting to two strikes way too often,” Kurtz said. “I’m just trying to be a little more aggressive and not look for that perfect pitch. I’m a good enough hitter to where I can do damage on other pitches as well.”
Combining for 866 feet on his two homers, Kurtz’s incredible power display was worthy of the A’s debuting their new home run celebration: The Home Run King championship belt.
Purchased by A’s starter Luis Severino, the belt is green with a large gold emblem that reads “Home Run King” at the top and the words “GOAT” and “Sacramento” at the bottom, with an image of a goat in sunglasses chewing grass in the middle.
“That’s the good and the bad, right?” said A’s starter JP Sears, who took the loss after allowing six runs on eight hits, including a career high four homers, over five innings. “It’d be good to see [Kurtz] swinging with a lot of power like we know he can. He’s done a great job since he’s been here balancing the expectations everyone had of him.”
The whole night in totality is one the A’s would like to forget in this difficult stretch, as they’ve now dropped 12 of their last 14 games.
This eight-game skid has been particularly frustrating. Early on, the offense was struggling to support its pitching staff. Over the past two losses, that has flipped, with the A’s collecting 12 and 11 hits, respectively, and taking early leads that the pitching has been unable to hold.
“These are stretches you go through as a club,” Kotsay said. “You don’t want it to continue, obviously. We had games where we pitched well and didn’t hit. Last couple of nights, we’ve scored some runs but haven’t thrown the ball well. It’s kind of a perfect storm in this eight-game stretch.”