Atlanta’s Ronald Acuña Jr. Looking to Join Barry Bonds and Eric Davis in the 30-50 Club
There’s something captivating about players who can both hit for power and steal bases. Typically, the league’s best power hitters and top base stealers occupy separate parts of the leaderboards, with the sluggers generally stealing fewer bases than the average player and the speedsters hitting the ball over the wall less often than the average Joe. Players who can do both at an elite level are often among the best and most exciting to play the game.
Hank Aaron is better known for hitting home runs at a prolific pace than for his skills on the bases, but he had a nine-year stretch from 1960 to 1968 during which he averaged nearly 22 steals per season to go along with his 36 homers per year. In 1963, he hit 44 homers and stole 31 bases. One of Aaron’s contemporaries, the great Willie Mays, averaged 38 homers and 28 steals per season from 1955 to 1962, which included a 35-HR/38-SB season and a 36-HR/40-SB season.
The player that embodies the power/steal dynamic better than anyone this year is Ronald Acuña Jr., with 11 homers and 22 steals in Atlanta’s first 52 games (through Saturday, May 27). The combination of what Acuña has already done this year with his rest-of-season projections from THE BAT X at FanGraphs suggests a 37-homer, 54-steal season is a realistic possibility. He recently had a stretch of homering in four straight games. He’s also had four multi-steal games.
The last time Acuña was healthy over a full 162-game season was in 2019, when he hit 41 homers and stole 37 bases, coming a few steals short of joining one of the most exclusive clubs in baseball, the 40-homer/40-steals club, which has just four members. Jose Canseco was the first to get there, with 42 homers and 40 steals in 1988. Barry Bonds joined him in 1996, with the same number of steals and homers. Two years later, Alex Rodriguez hit 42 big flies and stole 46 bags. The last player to achieve the feat was Alfonso Soriano in 2006, when he hit 46 dingers and had 41 thefts. And that’s it. That’s the list of 40-40 players Acuña could join.
As it is, he’s projected to comfortably reach 30 homers and 50 steals. That would put him in even more exclusive company as a member of the 30-HR/50-SB club, which includes just two players, Eric Davis and Barry Bonds. The version of Barry Bonds that accomplished this feat was the young, athletic coming-into-his-own Barry Bonds of the 1990 Pittsburgh Pirates as opposed to the veteran, colossal destroyer-of-baseballs Barry Bonds when he played with the San Francisco Giants later in his career.
In 1990, the 25-year-old Bonds was among the best young players in the game, but he had not yet had his breakout season. The 1990 season was that breakout. He was an All-Star for the first time, NL MVP for the first time, won his first Gold Glove and first Silver Slugger. He led the National League in wRC+ (165) and WAR (9.9, per FanGraphs). He also hit 33 homers and stole 52 bases, which granted him entry into the exclusive 30-HR/50-SB Club with charter member Eric Davis. It should be noted that over in the American League that year, 31-year-old Rickey Henderson came close to joining Bonds and Davis by hitting 28 homers and stealing 65 bases. Four years earlier, Rickey had 28 homers and 87 steals in 1986. He was in a club of his own.
The 1990 season was the only season in which Bonds stole 50 or more bases, but he went on to add four 30-30 seasons to his resume, including the aforementioned 40-40 season. When it came to hitting for power and stealing bases, the Bonds family cornered the market. Barry’s father, Bobby Bonds, had five 30-30 seasons, which included a 39-HR/43-SB season in 1973 that came tantalizingly close to being the first ever 40-40 season.
The first player to ever hit 30 homers and steal 50 bases in a season was Eric Davis, who was an incredibly talented player with the Cincinnati Reds in the 1980s. Davis could do everything on a baseball field: crush mammoth home runs, steal bases at will, and make great plays on defense. Unfortunately, he was consistently limited by injuries that prevented him from ever playing in more than 135 games in a season and his single-season high was 562 plate appearances.
Despite consistently missing time with injuries, Davis was an incredible player during a four-year stretch from 1986 to 1989 at ages 24 through 27. He averaged 93 runs scored, 31 homers, 91 RBI, and 46 steals while hitting .281/.377/.537 in 132 games played per year. His 148 wRC+ was third in baseball behind Wade Boggs and Will Clark for players with 2000 or more plate appearances. Only Darryl Strawberry hit more homers than Davis’ 124 and only Vince Coleman, Rickey Henderson, and Tim Raines stole more bases than Davis’ 186.
In 1986, Davis hit 27 homers and stole 80 bases, which was impressive enough to earn him down-ballot MVP votes. The next season, he hit 37 homers and stole 50 bases, becoming the first player to hit 30 or more homers and steal 50 or more bases. That’s very close to the projected end-of-year stats for Ronald Acuña Jr., making Acuña the closest thing we have to Eric Davis in baseball today. Acuña even has a history of injuries the last couple years, but hopefully that is behind him.
One final note on Eric Davis. At the peak of the power-hitting and base-stealing portion of his career, he had one of the most impressive “hidden” seasons of all-time. A “hidden” season is not confined by the calendar year, but instead stretches across two years, with some games played in one year and some played the next year. In the case of Eric Davis, from June 13, 1986, to June 8, 1987, his Cincinnati Reds played 162 games and he played in 143 of them. This is what he did:
143 G, 586 PA, 130 R, 114 RBI, 43 HR, 91 SB, .309/.406/.627, 172 wRC+.
That’s 43 home runs and 91 steals (with just 10 caught stealing) in 143 games played. True, it didn’t happen in one calendar season, but it’s still incredibly impressive. Younger baseball fans of today can get a taste of Eric Davis by watching Ronald Acuña Jr.
