Hunter Goodman Leads MLB in Road Home Runs
People have spent thirty years telling Colorado hitters that the thin air did it. Goodman hit 23 of his 38 home runs where the air is heavy.
Hunter Goodman came to the plate in the third inning Saturday in Detroit. Two runners stood on base, and neither team had scored. Tigers rookie Andrew Sears had put both of those runners on himself. Then Goodman worked the count full, and on the sixth pitch he pulled a three-run home run to left. Colorado led 3-0.
That was his 38th home run of the 2026 season. It was also his 23rd road home run of the year, and the second number is the one worth stopping on.
Every Colorado hitter gets handed the same caveat
Goodman plays his home games at Coors Field, a mile above sea level. The air up there is thin, so a fly ball carries farther than it would anywhere else. That much is true, and for thirty years people have used it as the small-print clause attached to every Rockies number. The park did that. It doesn’t really count.
So look at the catcher that clause is stapled to this season. Goodman is 26, and he has started 89 games behind the plate for Colorado this year. He has made the All-Star team in each of the last two years. He also won the National League Silver Slugger in 2025. That award goes to the best hitter at each position in each league, and no catcher in Rockies history had ever taken one home before him.
That same season he set four franchise marks at once. Two of them carry the point. He hit 31 home runs and drove in 91 runs, and no other primary catcher in Rockies history has reached either number in a season. Then he passed his own home run mark this summer.
Goodman answered the caveat in other people’s ballparks
Here is his season, split by where the ball landed.
| Home runs | OPS | |
|---|---|---|
| Away from Coors Field | 23 | .869 |
| At Coors Field | 15 | .807 |
More than half of Goodman’s power has happened on the road. In fact, he has been a better hitter away from Denver than in it. For a Colorado hitter, that is close to backwards.
And the 23 is not only a Colorado story. No hitter in either league has gone deep more often away from home this season. Matt Olson is the only other one who has even reached 20.
Only Larry Walker has hit more road home runs in a Rockies season. Walker hit 29 of them in 1997, the year he won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award. Goodman spent this summer gathering his evidence in the one place nobody could wave it off. He just kept hitting in ballparks where the air is heavy.
Goodman strikes out more than almost anyone, and he produces anyway
He strikes out in 32 percent of his trips to the plate. He misses on 35 percent of his swings. He chases four of every ten pitches thrown outside the strike zone. Those three numbers sit in the bottom five percent of the league, and they are the parts of his game scouts circle first.
Goodman has not fixed any of them. Still, no other catcher in baseball is close to him in home runs or in slugging percentage. He did not wait until he became a disciplined hitter to become a dangerous one.
Goodman did all of it from the crouch
He caught that game in Detroit. The lineup card has him batting third and squatting behind the plate. The box score has him at 1-for-4 with a walk, a strikeout and three runs driven in.
But the box score cannot show the rest of the shift. Before Goodman came to bat in the third, he had already worked two innings in the squat, in somebody else’s ballpark, on a September road trip. And he called the pitches for a team that would lose anyway. Colorado led 7-4 going to the bottom of the eighth, and Detroit scored seven runs in that inning to win 11-7. The catching is the job. The bat is what he adds on top of it, and the job never gets lighter because the hitting is going well.
Goodman is two home runs from 40. If he gets there, he will be the first Rockie to reach it since Nolan Arenado in 2019. He would also be the first National League catcher to do it since Javy Lopez in 2003.
But the home runs were never really the argument. Where he hit them is.
And that is a choice you get too. You do not get to choose the ballpark you grew up in. You do not get to choose the team, or the level people think is worth respecting. What you get to choose is what you do the week you play somewhere else.
Try this at your next practice
- The road routine. Write down your pre-game warm-up in order — every throw, every swing, every stretch — and then run it exactly the same way at your next away game. An away field hands you nothing familiar: different dirt, a different mound, nobody in the stands pulling for you. A routine is the one thing you get to bring with you, and it is what makes a strange field feel like your own before the first pitch.
- Call your own zone. Before a round of batting practice, tell your coach the one part of the strike zone you are going to swing at — middle-in, middle-away, belt and down, your pick. Take everything else, even strikes. Goodman chases four of every ten pitches outside the zone and produces anyway, but that makes him the exception, not the plan. Most hitters gain more from deciding early what they will swing at than from swinging harder.
- Two jobs, one round. Put on the full gear. Receive and block for ten minutes, then go straight into a hitting round without taking the chest protector off. Your legs will be heavier than usual and your hands will be slower — that is the point. A catcher’s at-bat always arrives on top of the catching, and the only way to get used to it is to feel it in practice.
Sources: Rockies at Tigers play-by-play and box score, Sept. 12, 2026 (ESPN) · Tigers 11-7 Rockies game recap (ESPN) · Hunter Goodman 2026 home and away splits (MLB Stats API) · Hunter Goodman Statcast profile (Baseball Savant) · Hunter Goodman Is Climbing Rockies Single-Season Home Run Rankings (Yahoo Sports) · Hunter Goodman Wins NL Silver Slugger Award (MLB.com)