I might be a little too excited after last night. I know that. But this is what we’ve all been waiting for, what we’ve all heard about for years, and now we finally got to see it.

Ethan Salas hit his first two career home runs last night in a 9-3 win over the Rockies in Denver. Led off the second inning with the first one. Then in the fifth, a two-run shot off Nick Frasso that turned an 8-1 game into a statement. Three RBIs on the night. And at 20 years and 107 days old, he’s now the youngest catcher in the history of Major League Baseball to have a multi-homer game. Not the youngest Padre. The youngest catcher, period, ever.

I don’t want to put a ton of pressure on this kid, I really don’t. But I also think he can handle it, because he’s been handling it since he was 16 years old. The Padres signed him for $5.6 million as an international free agent, the biggest bonus ever given out in the hard cap era, and he was the consensus number one prospect in the entire class before he’d even played a full pro season. They pushed him to Double-A before he turned 18. He dealt with a back injury that cost him almost all of 2025. Through all of it, every scout, every ranking, every write-up said the same thing about him. This is what he’s built for.

He made his MLB debut on September 2nd as the youngest catcher to debut since Pudge Rodriguez in 1991. That’s not a random comparison somebody made up to sound nice. That’s the actual bar. And two weeks later, in his ninth big league game, he’s already doing things no catcher his age has ever done. That’s not luck. That’s a kid who has been under a microscope since before he could drive, finally getting to show why everyone was watching in the first place.

I know it’s one game. I know I need to sit with that and not get ahead of myself. But I was still thinking about it the whole drive home, and I don’t think I’m wrong for that. This is the guy we’ve been hearing about since he was a teenager in Venezuela. Last night, for one night at least, he looked exactly like it.