Adley Rutschman carved out a slice of MLB history Thursday night, and he did it in a way that made the moment even stranger: with two home runs against the Orioles in Baltimore, just months after doing the same thing for Baltimore against Boston.
Rutschman, who the Boston Red Sox acquired from the Baltimore Orioles at the MLB trade deadline, had not done much for Boston before this return trip. But when he stepped back into Baltimore for the first time since the trade, the crowd gave him a standing ovation. He answered with a two-homer night against his former club.
That performance put him in a class of one. As OptaSTATS noted, Rutschman’s earlier two-homer game came on April 24, when he hit two for the Orioles against the Red Sox.
Then on Thursday, he did it again for the Red Sox against the Orioles. No player in MLB history had ever posted a multi-homer game on both sides of the same matchup in the same season.
There have been players who have gone deep twice or more against a former team before, but Rutschman’s case is different because both of those big nights came in the same season and in the same head-to-head matchup.
The two games were both played in Baltimore and were separated by a little more than four months. Boston won the Sept. 3 game 6-5, while Baltimore took the April meeting 10-3. Between those two nights, Rutschman became the only hitter in MLB history to log a multi-homer game for both teams in one matchup in a single season.
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