Jorge Polanco followed Royals slugger’s lead with rare feat in Mariners playoff win

It’s certainly not ideal to be witnessing October unfold from the outside looking in, but that’s unfortunately where the Kansas City Royals find themselves at the moment.

Still, even if Major League Baseball is without the Royals this month, that doesn’t mean the Royals haven’t seen their fair share of playoff mentions.

During the Seattle Mariners’ ALDS victory over the Detroit Tigers on Sunday, a dominant performance by, ironically enough, a former AL Central foe in Jorge Polanco reminded the baseball world of former Royals slugger Jorge Soler.

How so? Well, Polanco would achieve a rare and unique feat in the win, one that was achieved by Soler before anyone else several years earlier.

Jorge Polanco took a page out of Jorge Soler’s book with multi-homer game in Mariners’ win

Seattle’s nail-biting 3-2 win over Detroit was somewhat an improbable one with potential back-to-back AL Cy Young award winner Tarik Skubal on the mound.

That however did not faze the veteran Polanco in the slightest in Game 2, as the second baseman took Skubal deep not once, but twice.

After going 7.2 innings of three hit, one run ball in his Wild Card outing against the Cleveland Guardians earlier in the week, following a 2.21 ERA, 0.89 WHIP and .199 BAA regular season, it’s proven to be incredibly hard to hit Skubal altogether. But home runs in particular have been hard to hit against the world class southpaw, as he only surrendered 0.83 HR/9 this season.

This difficulty isn’t isolated to just this season though, as Skubal hasn’t been susceptible to the long-ball for the majority of his career. Since 2022, the Tigers’ ace holds the seventh lowest HR/9 clip among qualified starters at 0.71.

So, it’s no coincidence that he’s seldomly been taken deep twice by the same player in one game. In fact, as MLB Network pointed out, Polanco is just the fourth hitter to achieve this unique accomplishment.

That being said, the first player to do this was none other than Soler, who accomplished this back in July of 2021 with the Royals.

Happening during the dog days of summer on Juky 25 and well before Skubal was the Cy Young arm he is now, Soler’s multi-homer game over him wasn’t in nearly as high-stakes and improbable as Polanco was. But two homers is two homers, so it was still impressive nonetheless.

Soler would go 3-for-4 that day, tagging Skubal for two homers in the first and third inning in Kansas City’s 6-1 over Detroit.

This game would cap off his second-to-last series with the Royals before he was dealt to the Atlanta Braves at the trade deadline just days later. He’d go on to win the World Series with Atlanta that season and capture World Series MVP honors in the process.

That season, Soler would hit .223 with 27 HR, 70 RBI and a .749 OPS in 149 games split between the Royals and Braves.

Power has defined Soler’s career and certainly was the trademark of his time in Kansas City, as 80 of his 203 career homers came in a Royals uniform. This included his 48 homer season in 2019 which was the first 40+ homer season by a Royals player at the time and is still tied with the great Salvador Perez for the franchise’s single-season home run record.