Eli Whitney | July 19, 2026
Hunter Goodman spent Sunday afternoon chasing history, and the Rockies spent it chasing the Reds.
Goodman homered three times — his 28th, 29th, and 30th of the season – to become the first player in franchise history with two three-homer games in the same year, but Cincinnati’s eight-run eruption across the first two innings proved too much to overcome in a 9-6 Colorado loss that dropped the series finale at Coors Field.
The hole was dug fast. Ryan Feltner surrendered a three-run homer to Nathanial Lowe and a two-run shot to Tyler Stephenson in a five-run first, then Sal Stewart‘s 456-foot, three-run blast in the second made it 8-1. Feltner was done after 2.1 innings, charged with a career-high-matching eight runs. He didn’t sugarcoat the stuff, but pushed back on the idea that it was a command problem.
“Control felt fine. I got some breaking balls that didn’t move the way I wanted them to,” Feltner said. “The fastball was the only thing that felt normal, so I leaned into that and just threw it as hard as I could.”
That approach produced a three-strikeout second inning fueled, by his own admission, by “a little bit of rage.”
He shrugged off any post-break concern.
“I felt really good with my mechanics, my body, my process. Whatever happened today, I’m not really concerned about at all.”
Manager Warren Schaeffer saw it differently.
“The command wasn’t real good at all. It wasn’t sharp,” Schaeffer said. “The walks hurt, and then obviously the homers. The off-speed pitches were hung, and he got hurt for it.”
Goodman answered immediately with a two-out solo homer off Hunter Greene, added a two-run shot in the sixth, and completed the trifecta with another two-run blast in the eighth — 425, 435, and 442 feet, five RBI in all. The catcher now owns five multi-homer games this season, most in the majors, and joined Larry Walker, Todd Helton, and Carlos González as the only Rockies with multiple three-homer games in a career.
“It’s definitely cool knowing all the great players that have played here, the Hall of Famers,” Goodman said. “It’s pretty cool.”
His explanation for the outburst was appropriately simple: “It’s a July day game, hot Coors Field. The ball tends to fly on those days, and I got some good pitches to hit.”
He’d taken the previous day off entirely — “I told myself I wasn’t going to swing the bat unless there was a chance I was pinch hitting” — and credited the reset.
Goodman reached 30 home runs in 101 team games, the fourth-fastest to the mark in franchise history behind only Vinny Castilla, Andres Galarraga, and Larry Walker.
Tanner Gordon kept the game within reach, following Feltner with 5.2 innings of one-run relief — his third straight relief appearance of four-plus innings.
“TG is fearless. He goes right after you,” Schaeffer said. “The changeup was really good today, putting the fastball where he wanted to. He was huge for the bullpen to save it.”
Goodman echoed him: “He commands four pitches really well, and when he’s commanding the ball, he has good outings.”
Willi Castro‘s ninth-inning homer — his second in three days — brought the final margin to three, and the Rockies’ late-inning push fit a season-long pattern Goodman was quick to cite.
“The stats, the eighth inning and beyond, we’re number one in baseball,” he said. “We never feel like we’re out of it.”
But the early deficit was fatal: Stephenson added a second homer in the fifth for Cincinnati, which got a multi-homer game from a different player in all three games of the series.
The loss dropped Colorado to 40-61 and sealed a series defeat in the first set out of the All-Star break.
“Every game is different. Today. Down big after two innings, it’s really hard to come back from that,” Schaeffer said. “But we kept fighting. It’s one series where we lost. We move on to the next one.”
The Nationals come to Coors Field next — with Goodman, suddenly scorching again, leading the way.
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