3 Atlanta Braves Takeaways from a Friday night win at St. Louis

2.  More communication, less spectacle

This is almost entirely about Ronald Acuña Jr.

Let’s go back to that third inning.  Apart from the box score’s account, here’s what really happened.

A fly ball was hit into left center field.  Both Austin Riley (LF) and Ronald Acuna (CF) were there in time to catch the ball.

Riley was positioned better to make the catch, but it appeared that he saw Acuna approaching, feared a collision, and immediately went tentative.  The ball bounced off his glove and Kolton Wong reached second base.

This was ruled an E7 on Riley, but there needs to be changes here:

• If Acuna can reach the ball, Acuna needs to aggressively call off Riley and make the play.
• If he can’t – or won’t – he needs to come in well behind Riley so that he’s not distracting his outfield-inexperienced teammate.

The official scoring is correct:  the error had to be given to Riley.  However, this miscue really should be laid at the feet of Acuna.

The center fielder must take charge in such situations, and while he hasn’t played the position for long at the major league level, he is well experienced from minor league play and should know better.

THE VERY NEXT PLAY

Ronald Acuna was right in the middle of the next one, 2 pitches later.  Harrison Bader drilled a ball to deep center field.  He was credited with a triple, though Acuna got his own leather on this one.

Trouble was, he merely knocked the ball down because he ran to the wrong spot and had to turn back awkwardly to try and make a play on the ball.

This is effectively the result of a misread, which may be happening due to lack of recent center field experience…. except that it’s happened multiple times in recent weeks.

I can think of at least 2 other occasions in which Acuna nearly made a spectacular play (and a couple of others where he did complete the play successfully).

Trouble is, a more refined route could have led to outs in nearly every case… without the process looking like an all-out Superman effort.

These are the growing pains of a young outfielder, and indeed, he is doing well out there as things are (witness successful sun-shieldings in San Francisco on Sunday afternoon – excellent job there).

Eric Young is working with the outfielders, and he does have his hands full with these recent changes.

Happily, the Braves – and Mike Foltynewicz – was able to work around these miscues and avoid a disastrous inning.