The Atlanta Braves had the league leader in homers last season, but it’s predicted to change hands for 2024
Last season, the Atlanta Braves hit a ton of home homers.
The 2023 Braves, who didn’t have the benefit of a “juiced” baseball, tied the 2019 Minnesota Twins for the most home runs in a single regular season with 307 longballs launched. Despite acknowledging that he wasn’t always attempting to smash home runs, first baseman Matt Olson set a new team record with 54 home runs, leading all of baseball.
However, predictions indicate that he won’t be able to hold onto his homer crown in 2024. Rather, it will be given to Ronald Acuña Jr.
According to FanGraphs’ most recent ZiPS estimates, Ronald would lead all of MLB with 43 home runs. Furthermore, Ronald’s concept of hitting 43 home runs isn’t all that crazy—he already hit 41 in 2019 and 2023, so one strong game can set a new career high for home runs.
No, what makes this story more interesting is that Matt Olson is expected to drastically underperform compared to his record-breaking season last year. ZiPs projects Olson’s line to be.260/.360/.515 with 37 home runs.
To put things in perspective, Olson’s 2023 line was.283/.389/.604, and he led the league in RBI (139), home runs, and slugging.
Why is Olson’s projection so low, too? While projection techniques do presuppose regression and are therefore by nature conservative, why would Olson’s slugging decline by over 100 points?
I believe it’s because Olson outperformed his projected 2023 figures. There are a few reasons, according to MLB Statcast, to anticipate a regression on paper.
Olson was only projected to hit 50 home runs in 2023; eight of those hits were deemed “doubters,” indicating the particular batted ball wouldn’t have been a home run in more than eight ballparks. It’s also hilarious to look at his “Expected Home Runs by Park” table, which projects Olson to have low-40s totals if he played in Pittsburgh (44), San Francisco (43), or St. Louis (42).
Olson may also be to blame for his overachievement in terms of batted ball analytics. Olson’s “expected” batting average (.264) and “expected” slugging (.558) for the previous season were based on the launch angles, exit velocities, and directions of his batted balls; both figures were easily surpassed. A portion of this can be attributed to chance and random variation, which tends to normalize with larger samples.
Why the forecasts are inaccurate
However, I believe that part of it is also overemphasizing Olson’s early-season performance before he switched lineup positions. Olson, who batted primarily second, with a strikeout percentage of 29.9% and a batting line of.228/.347/.483 until June 14th (only 18 home runs in those 68 games).
Olson batted.324/.420/.693 with 36 home runs in 94 games and an 18.2% strikeout rate coming into play after switching to mostly cleanup the following day.
If I were betting, I would go with the over on Olson’s anticipated 37 home runs. Atlanta raked as a result of having figured out what works now.