Chas McCormick’s premonition precipitates an ‘incredible’ day for Jake Meyers

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CHICAGO — Before the best game of his life, Jake Meyers bemoaned baseball’s complexities with one of his buddies. Meyers is beating Chas McCormick in a battle for playing time, but it does not diminish their bromance. They share a draft class, deadpan style and the peculiar perk of throwing left-handed while hitting right-handed.

The two men spent Saturday morning wondering if extra-base hits have become harder to collect. Neither had a home run after the Houston Astros’ first 31 games. Meyers had four doubles. McCormick had one. Gaps are smaller, the two surmised, turning hustle doubles into a thing of the past. Their lighthearted discussion ended with a prediction from one friend to another.

“You know what,” McCormick told Meyers, “I feel like you’re going to have a clip today.”

McCormick’s slang segued into slug for a team desperately needing it. Only three teams entered Saturday with fewer “clips” than Houston’s homer-starved lineup. Meyers is not the player anyone — aside from his best friend — would pick to remedy that.

“Basically won the game for us today,” McCormick said. “That’s kind of what we needed — we needed a guy to show up and Jake was the guy.”

Meyers struck two home runs, tripled, doubled and drove in all but one of his team’s eight runs during its 8-3 victory against the Chicago White Sox. Meyers matched a franchise record with 13 total bases, drove in a career-high seven runs and became the first Astro to go 4-for-4 with two homers, a double and a triple. He fell one total base short of tying the major-league record by a nine-hole hitter.

“Incredible,” Meyers said. “A lot of hard work (is) paying off. Just grateful that it showed up today, kind of all together. It was a lot of fun.”

Meyers is on the roster to play remarkable defense in center field. Anything the Astros extract from his bat is supposed to be lagniappe, but the listless state of this lineup mandates more out of marginal offensive players.

Meyers increased his OPS by 162 points and now boasts a .295 batting average after 88 at-bats. Only three qualified Astros hitters are over .250. The minuscule sample can’t be discounted, but Meyers now sits ahead of Christian Walker and Jeremy Peña on the team’s RBI leaderboard.

Meyers now boasts more extra-base hits than Jose Altuve and Yordan Alvarez, whom Houston scratched from its lineup on Saturday with inflammation in his right hand. Meyers drove in seven runs during four plate appearances on Saturday afternoon. Walker has nine across his first 116 at-bats as an Astro, accentuating the anemia of a lineup Meyers willed to a win almost by himself.

“We know how good the top of our order is and we know those guys, at some point, are going to get hot,” manager Joe Espada said. “But once those guys get hot at the top and we can get some guys on the bottom of the order on base, it’s going to be fun to watch.”

“It’s a long season. Everybody’s grinding. But I thought today was a resilient effort by everybody.”

Each of Meyers’ extra-base hits carried at least a 100.4 mph exit velocity. His home runs were majestic. They each traveled at least 386 feet and, according to Statcast, would have been home runs in all 30 major-league ballparks. Meyers massacred a hanging slider for his first home run, turning on Chicago starter Davis Martin’s first pitch of the third inning while staying true to his tendencies.

Jake brought his rake to Chi-town.#BuiltForThis pic.twitter.com/pjpNIJGLKa

— Houston Astros (@astros) May 3, 2025

Patience is not part of Meyers’ procedure. Another ambushing outfielder overshadows him inside the Astros’ lineup, but Meyers is perhaps even more prone to pouncing on the first or second pitch he sees than Altuve, the foremost aficionado of aggression.

Meyers’ success depends on it. He does not have Altuve’s advanced barrel control or contact ability, nor can he diagnose much spin. Meyers awoke Saturday with a career .906 OPS across the past 185 instances he had put the first pitch in play. Three of his four hits came within the first two pitches of the plate appearance.

The other is an outlier, underscoring where Meyers must make more strides to become a complete offensive player. Two-strike counts are almost automatic outs for a man with a career .128/.214/.203 slash line in those situations.

Before stepping into the batter’s box in the fourth inning on Saturday, Meyers did not have a hit during his first 35 at-bats of the season in a two-strike count. Martin threw two four-seam fastballs by Meyers to get ahead 0-2, a count in which Meyers is a career .110 hitter.

“That just comes with the things I’m focusing on: being competitive through an entire AB and really focusing on how I can help the team win,” Meyers said. “That’s showing consistent, competitive at-bats.”

Meyers spoiled four of Martin’s two-strike pitches while watching three others sail outside the strike zone. Forced back into the zone, Martin fired a middle-middle fastball. Meyers mashed it for a two-run triple, giving Houston a lead Meyers would only increase.

“That was the at-bat of the game,” Espada said. “That was really impressive how he fouled (off) some tough pitches and stayed in the at-bat. That was a key turning point.”

Meyers saw four more pitches across the next five innings, falling back into familiar habits with fantastic results. Never before — not as a two-way player at Nebraska or at Omaha Westside High School — had he authored a game like this. Replicating it will be impossible, but a friend will call his clips just in case.

“I’m going to tell him that every day now,” said a smiling McCormick.

(Photo of Jake Meyers: Matt Dirksen / Getty Images)

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