“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Aristotle

“Once is luck. Twice is proof.”
– Unknown

My father used to say the second phrase above, and as much as I love and miss him, I’m not fully willing attribute it to that wonderful redneck farmboy who left home at 14 and primarily graduated high school because they’d both had just about enough of each other. Who knows? Maybe Pop had heard Aristotle’s quote sometime in middle school, and that was how it survived by the time he was in his 30’s. Hard to say. But the axiom holds pretty true.

Doing something right once could have been pure blind luck. Doing it again shows it wasn’t an accident.

To that end, Colorado Rockies catch Hunter Goodman is proving in a big way that his success in the majors is no accident, being named to his second straight All-Star game. What’s a little crazier is the rocket ship career of the last few years that got him there.

A few scant years ago, Goodman was a junior at Memphis, and the star of his club. After a sophomore season where his rise had gone from ascendant to supernova, the campaign was suddenly shortened by the COVID shutdown. The break didn’t stop Hunter’s meteoric rise, hitting a school record 21 home runs that last season.

The Rockies grabbed him in the fourth round of the draft, and he spent the next couple seasons climbing the ranks of Colorado’s minor league system. And climb he did. From single-A to triple-A, Goodman hit, and hit, and hit. He even made it to the big club at the end of 2023, and looked solid. In 2024, he bounced back and forth between triple-A and the Rox, excelling in both spaces, and even occasionally spending a game tearing the cover off the ball as a backup catcher. He played with the big club enough to have it qualify as his rookie season. Hopes were high for Hunter’s future.

High enough that the club had seen enough to promote him to their starting catcher last year. While they expected big things, no one really foresaw his .278/.323/.520 (120 OPS+) year, hitting 31 home runs, notching his first All-Star appearance (as Colorado’s sole representative), and winning his first Silver Slugger award.

So maybe it’s folly to think that anyone could have considered that sort of an arc a bit of fool’s gold in what was obviously such a decisive pattern, but Goodman went ahead and made sure to prove himself out.

2026 will be Hunter’s second straight year as Colorado’s only-and-lonely All Star attendee, and hopefully maybe even get to take some swing in the Home Run Derby, with two spots to compete still available. Goodman on pace to top last year’s impressive numbers, including hitting 27 homers so far this season… three of which came in a single game against the Twins last week. Everything about Goodman passes the eye test… and not only keeps on passing, but keeps on improving.

When you’re testing something scientifically to see whether or not it’s true, one of the key factors in sorting out fact from fiction is repeatability. Can someone else doing the same thing achieve the same result? Or how often does this outcome keep occurring? You can get all fancy about it with millions of data points and statistical significance, analysts and metrics and scatterplots galore.

But you can also flip a switch on a wall a time… or two… or maybe a dozen… and start to realize that the action you’re taking seems to keep on turning on that bright thing hanging from the ceiling. Either way, you’ve jumped from correlation to causation pretty quickly. With yet another All-Star appearance under his belt in his second try at it, and impressive numbers only getting stronger over time, Hunter Goodman has made a fairly unimpeachable case he is the best thing these Colorado Rockies have going. Twice. Once may have, however unlikely, been luck. Twice is proof.