In his rookie season (2018), Ronald Acuña Jr. took Major League Baseball by storm. As the eventual (and obvious choice for) NL Rookie of the Year, Acuña slashed .293/.366/.552 with 26 homers in just 111 games!
This year, unsurprisingly, he’s picked up right where he left off last season, slashing .302/.431/.642 entering today’s game with 5 long balls already to his name.
Excuse, me make that SIX:
sOpHoMoRe sLuMp pic.twitter.com/iq55pPbXR2
— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) April 17, 2019
Yep.
That’s 21-year-old Acuña dropping to one knee for an opposite field blast. According to Statcast, that ball left the bat at 114.7 MPH and traveled 448 feet!
As Mark Bowman points out on Twitter, that homer came exactly one foot shy of the longest opposite field blast by a right-handed hitter in the entire Statcast era (Paul Goldschmidt holds the record at 449 feet, but he did it in the hitter-friendly Coors Stadium).
AND ACUÑA DID IT ON ONE KNEE.