2 Braves on pace to have a historic season

This story was excerpted from Mark Bowman’s Braves Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Ronald Acuña Jr. is on pace for 36 homers and 76 stolen bases. Who has tallied the most stolen bases during a 30-homer season? Barry Bonds had 52 stolen bases and 33 homers for the Pirates in 1990. Eric Davis is the only other member of the 30-50 club, having homered 37 times and stolen 50 bases in ‘87.

Acuña homered 11 times in August 2018 and 11 times in August ‘19. A similar total during this month would create some excitement, as he would have a legit chance to join Jose Canseco (1988), Bonds (‘96), Alex Rodriguez (‘98) and Alfonso Soriano (2006) as the only players to enjoy a 40-40 season.

It looked like Acuña was going to join that club in 2019, but he ended up four steals short when a minor ailment sidelined him for the regular season’s final four games.

MLB.com’s Marino Panchano recently wrote about how Acuña could end up with a 40-40 season.

60-homer season?

Matt Olson is on pace to hit 59 homers, which is eight more than Andruw Jones hit when he set the franchise record in 2005. But if he maintains the pace he has created over the past two months, there’s a chance he could produce what would be just the 10th 60-homer season in AL/NL history.

Olson has averaged 4.45 plate appearances and he homered once every 8.7 plate appearances since moving to the fifth spot of the Braves’ lineup on June 15. If he were to maintain this same pace over the final 45 games, he’d hit 23 more homers, which would give him 66 for the season.

Imagine having somebody with a 40-40 or 30-60 season and another player with a 60-homer season in the same lineup.