Ronald Acuña Jr. is high on the list of baseball’s coolest players. The 24-year-old Venezuelan has turned into one of the league’s brightest young stars, a legitimate 5-tool talent and one of the centerpieces of the Atlanta Braves’ franchise as it looks to defend the World Series it won while he was on the sideline last season.
Acuña’s 2021 season was cut short after he suffered a torn ACL in July, and this season, the former Rookie of the Year didn’t get to make his debut until the end of April. As a result, he’s been a bit rusty, and he entered Friday night’s game against the Milwaukee Brewers hitting .200 and with zero home runs.
He did manage, however, to fix the whole zero home runs thing pretty emphatically during the game. Acuña stepped up to the plate against Eric Lauer in the bottom of the fourth and got a 1-1 breaking ball. It was down and outside in the strike zone and Acuña read it perfectly, and as a result, he hit the thing 450 feet to dead center. He managed to pull this off while falling down, too.
.@ronaldacunajr24 crushed this one.
#ForTheA pic.twitter.com/lu7gqerGmU
— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) May 7, 2022
There are lots of ways for baseball players to get their uniforms dirty, none of them are as cool as hitting a dinger.