Ronald Acuña Jr. And Eric Davis: Comparing Power-Speed Phenoms
We look at Ronald Acuña Jr.'s unique combination of power and speed and how it stacks up to that of former Reds star Eric Davis.
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . Eric Davis spent the majority of his 17-year MLB career with the Cincinnati Reds (nine years). For many years, Davis had the distinction of hitting for the most recent cycle in Reds history, which occurred on June 2, 1989. This feat was recently matched by Cincy’s rookie phenom Elly De La Cruz, who hit for the cycle in his 15th career game on June 23, 2023, and wears No. 44 partly as a tribute to Davis, who is a Reds club executive and one of his mentors.
. . . De La Cruz’s cycle occurred against Ronald Acuña Jr.’s Atlanta Braves, and though Acuña has not yet hit for the cycle in his young career, he has been a similarly electrifying presence to De La Cruz and Davis on many occasions. Acuña made his MLB debut in Cincinnati on April 25, 2018, and got his first career hit in that game. He hit his first career home run the next day, also in Cincy -- a second-deck blast off of Reds starter Homer Bailey.
Leading Off
Remembering Eric Davis
By Paul White
We’ve passed the All-Star break, and if awards were handed out for the season’s first half, there’s little doubt that Ronald Acuña Jr. would be the National League MVP. He’s the best player in the league, is on the best team in the league, and he’s doing things that haven’t been done in a long, long time.
Here’s the list of every player since 1900 to surpass 20 homers and 40 steals in his first 89 games played in a season:
Ronald Acuña Jr., 2023
That’s the full list.
Due to a combination of skill, health, revamped rules for holding runners, and slightly shorter distances between bases, Acuña is demonstrating a devastating combination of power and speed. He’s just 25 years old and already has a Rookie of the Year award, four All-Star appearances, a World Series ring, and is now having his best season. He appears to have a wonderful career in front of him.
But Acuña’s remarkable skill set is one we’ve seen before. Those of us old enough to remember the 1980s will recall that Eric Davis of the Reds was putting on a similar show more than a decade before Acuña was even born.
In 1987, when Davis was also 25 years old, he fell three steals short of 40 in his first 89 games, keeping him from joining Acuña on that list. But he blasted 29 homers in that span compared to Acuña’s 21, so it’s fair to say he was at least as devastating as a dual weapon.
And that was the second straight year of Davis being a remarkable power-speed dual threat. In 1986, he finished the season with 80 steals and 27 home runs in just 132 games and had 16 of those homers and a remarkable 61 steals through his first 89 games.
Davis was every bit the player Acuña is, as a quick comparison shows us. Here are their respective numbers on a per-162 game basis through age 25:
Acuña: 127 runs scored, 180 hits, 38 homers, 94 RBIs, 40 steals, 137 OPS+, .286/.376/.527 slash line, 6.2 WAR
Davis: 120 runs scored, 140 hits, 36 homers, 95 RBIs, 68 steals, 142 OPS+, .273/.369/.542 slash line, 7.4 WAR
The problem for Davis is that he simply could not stay on the field. His career high in games for a single season was just 135, which he achieved when he was 26 years old. It was an issue that plagued him his entire career, eventually sapping his power and speed and resulting in him bouncing between several teams for most of his 30s.
Davis played hard, thinking nothing of slamming into walls, sliding hard into bases, and diving for balls. The result, unfortunately, was a string of injuries, some of them quite severe. One of them occurred in the first inning of Game 4 of the 1990 World Series, which the Reds shockingly won by sweeping the heavily favored Oakland A’s. Davis had played well in the Series to that point, including a first-inning homer in Game 1 that scored the first run of the Series. But when Willie McGee looped a ball into left field and Davis dove to catch it, he landed wrong, lacerating his kidney in four places and forcing him to leave the game. Surgery was required to repair it, and Davis felt the injury affected him for the next three years and altered how he played for the rest of his career.
A battle with colon cancer in 1997 halted a promising start to his first season in Baltimore, but he managed to come back in September and help the Orioles win the American League East. He was awarded both the Hutch Award and the Roberto Clemente Award for his inspirational comeback.
Sadly, Davis had only one more full season, and ultimately retired in 2001 having played only 1,626 games in parts of 17 big league seasons. Still, while he was relatively healthy, Davis was the closest we’ve seen to the skill set Acuña is now demonstrating.
Acuña has already had his own troubling injury history. He missed a month in his rookie year of 2018 with a knee injury. In 2021, he tore his ACL in July and missed the rest of the season, including the Braves’ run through the World Series. That injury lingered into the following spring, forcing him to miss the team’s first 19 games and limiting him to just 119 games for the year.
He appears to have the injury bug behind him in 2023, and we’re finally able to see his remarkable skills on full display. We should enjoy them now though, because the lesson of Eric Davis’ career is that skills like these are both rare and, sadly, fleeting.
Paul White is an IBWAA Life Member who writes at Lost in Left Field. He is also a member of SABR and has written for their BioProject and Games Project. Paul is currently writing a book for McFarland Publishers about the history of the Hall of Fame’s recognition of the Negro Leagues. He lives with his wife in the suburbs of Kansas City.