Do Not Sleep on Ronald Acuña Jr.

Between the fireworks shows put on by 21-year-olds Juan Soto and Fernando Tatis Jr., and the big numbers put up by teammates Freddie Freeman and Marcell Ozuna, Ronald Acuña Jr. didn’t command as much attention as his talents merited last year. A two-week stay on the injured list didn’t help, particularly when it came to posting eye-opening counting stats. Even so, and even in abbreviated form, Acuña turned in his third straight stellar campaign. As he heads into his age-23 season, his place among the game’s elite shouldn’t be ignored.

Acuña entered the 2020 season on a high note, following up his 2018 NL Rookie of the Year campaign with his first as an All-Star. Playing in 156 games in 2019, he hit .280/.365/.518 (126 wRC+), bashed 41 homers and stole a league-high 37 bases in 46 attempts; three more steals, and he would have joined Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez, and Alfonso Soriano as the only members of the 40–40 club. Back in the Baseball Abstract days, Bill James introduced a simple stat called Power-Speed number, which takes the harmonic mean of a player’s home run and stolen base totals. Acuña’s 2019 season is tied for 16th overall, and sixth among players 25 or under:

Those are some of the most electrifying seasons ever put together by young players. Landing between the more extreme of Davis’ two amazing seasons and a Mays one — well, that is some damn company. It’s also quite frankly far more interesting than Acuña’s 5.6 WAR ranking eighth in the NL that season and ninth among all seasons by position players 21 and under in the post-1960 expansion era.

Acuña’s 2020 season wasn’t quite as electrifying. In fact, he started quite slowly, going just 5-for-33 with 17 strikeouts and no homers through his first eight games before heating up over his next 11 games with four homers. Alas, he was scratched from the Braves’ lineup on August 11 due to soreness in his left wrist and wound up missing 10 games for what was diagnosed merely as inflammation, a problem he believed stemmed from an awkward dive into a base. He homered in his first game back on August 26, off the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole, but after five games was sidelined again for a few days due to right hamstring tightness. Upon returning to the lineup, he homered three times in a doubleheader and once the next day, and he didn’t miss another game.

Acuña finished the season with a .250/.406/.582 line. His batting average was atypically low, 35 points worse than what he’d done in 2018–19, but he hit the ball harder than ever. His 92.4 mph average exit velocity, 16% barrel rate, .425 xwOBA, and 57% hard-hit rate all placed in the 91st percentile to the 98th percentile.

Acuña did that while swinging at a career-low 40.7% of pitches (down from the 45–46% range in his first two seasons), with his swing rate in the strike zone dropping about seven points to 60.3% and his swing rate out of the zone falling about two points to 21.1%. Protecting his wrist may have been a factor, given that Braves general manager Alex Anthopoulos told the media it was still sore throughout the postseason (recall him aggravating the wrist after taking a tumble while legging out an infield hit in NLCS Game 4, after which he went 1-for-12 with two walks). Acuña’s rolling swing rate doesn’t line up perfectly with the reported injury, but he definitely swung less later in the season:

I included 2019 for comparison; Acuña’s only time in 2020 above his two-year average (the dotted line) was the period between his two absences. Anyway, via his more disciplined approach, his walk rate spiked to 18.8%, which ranked third in the NL and was about eight points higher than 2019. His .406 on-base percentage and .581 slugging percentage both represented career bests and ranked seventh and eighth in the league, respectively. His 2.4 WAR was tied for eighth and his 14 homers was tied for 12th — that despite missing just under a quarter of the season.

With Freeman hitting .341/.462/.640 with a league-high 3.3 WAR en route to the NL MVP award and a second-place finish behind Soto in all three slash stats, and Ozuna leading the league in homers (18), RBI (56), and total bases (145), Acuña was merely the third-most productive Braves hitter. It felt as though he didn’t capture the public imagination as a prodigy the way that the 21-year-old Soto and Tatis did. A 22-year-old veteran doing those things? Old news.

Given the eight-year, $100 million extension that he signed in April 2019, Acuña certainly isn’t lined up to be paid like Tatis, who signed a 14-year, $340 million extension last month, or Soto, whom the Nationals reportedly plan to offer a long-term extension, if they haven’t already. The latter, who has 25 days less service time than Acuña (two years and 134 days to two and 159), is making $8.5 million going year-to-year. Acuña, meanwhile, will be paid a fraction of what he’s projected to be worth during his mid- and late 20s thanks to a deal that former colleague Craig Edwards called “hard to fully comprehend,” as he signed away two to four seasons of free agency (the last two are club options) for which he’ll earn just $17 million per year.

That said, I’m not here to rehash that contract, as exasperating as it is. I’m here because I’ve been dreaming on Acuña since drawing the right field assignment in our annual Positional Power Rankings and trying to place him in the context of the aforementioned whippersnappers, whose long-term projections I’ve examined at length. Before getting to the whole thing, I’ll note that ZiPS projects him to be worth 5.9 WAR in 2021, the fourth-highest total in the majors behind Trout (6.7), Alex Bregman (6.0), and Betts (6.0), with Soto just below him at 5.7. Steamer doesn’t hold him in quite as high regard, with his 5.3 WAR there ranking ninth, but in our Depth Charts projections, which averages the two systems with manual adjustments for playing time, he’s in a virtual tie for fifth with José Ramírez at 5.7 WAR.

Dan Szymborski recently published ZiPS projections for 2022 and ’23 to go with this year’s, and that’s where the fun really starts:

Oh hello, guy who’s within a win of Soto and Trout over a three-year period.

This actually shouldn’t be too big of a surprise if you’ve been following Dan’s work, because ZiPS loves Acuña. A year ago this month, just before the world fell apart, Dan examined the likely candidates to overtake Trout as the game’s best player as measured by projected WAR. He found Lindor to have the best chance of passing Trout in his projections in both 2021 and ’22, albeit with just a 9.7% chance in the former year and 11.7% chance in the latter. That didn’t come to pass, as Lindor failed to light the world on fire in the pandemic-shortened season. Come 2024, however, the projections showed Acuña with an 18.8% chance of having the game’s highest projected WAR, ahead of Trout’s 16.1%, with Soto third at 10.2%. The same three players are in the same order for ’25, with Acuña and Soto maintaining the top two spots in that order through ’29, as far as the exercise ran.

I’ll return to the Acuña-Soto battle in a moment, but having teased it long enough, here’s the full Acuña projection:

Whew, those are some monster numbers. Acuña projects to be a 6–7.5 win player through the remainder of his 20s, bashing 40 or more homers a year and stealing upwards of 20 bags. While he projects to strike out more often than any player besides Reggie Jackson (2,597) and Jim Thome (2,548) by the end of this stretch, he also projects to post a home run total in their orbit; his 582 dingers would rank 12th all time, one short of Mark McGwire and three rungs ahead of Jackson (563). In fact, he projects to join Bonds, Rodriguez, and Mays as the only players to reach both 500 homers and 300 stolen bases.

With 82.1 career WAR and 46.8 peak WAR, Acuña’s 64.5 JAWS would rank eighth between Al Kaline (70.8) and Jackson (60.4), though by then Betts figures to be in the neighborhood as well. Through seven seasons, two of them partial (his 52-game rookie campaign and last year), the Dodgers’ star already has the 11th-highest peak score among right fielders (45.4) and would climb to ninth with a comparatively modest 5.0 WAR this year. Soto, if he stays in right, would climb into the top 10, too.

The Acuña-Soto head-to-head battle now tilts in the Washingtonian’s favor:

Presumably, Soto now has the better odds of overtaking Trout in Dan’s long-term outlook, but all of this is subject to change as these players actually do the things that make us care about them enough to wade into these numbers in the first place.

Like Soto and Tatis, Acuña is off to a tremendous start that has already placed his name in the pantheon alongside some of baseball’s all-time greats, and the odds — remember, that’s a median projection above, based on a career that’s already 1,404 plate appearances deep — suggest his road will lead to Cooperstown, too. I’ve said this before, but it’s going to be a thrill to watch these careers unfold.