OK, Did You See that Acuña Homer?

All right, I know it’s a Sunday morning, but can we talk about that Ronald Acuña Jr. home run from Saturday? We have to talk about that Ronald Acuña Jr. home run from Saturday. It’s one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen.

Before we do that, yep, I’m going to give you one more preorder book blast because we’re at the finish line now; I leave for New York Monday morning, bright and early, and begin this amazing book tour. Going to be on MLB Now Tuesday. Going to be talking baseball with Bob Costas Tuesday night. And away we go.

I’m sure most of you already have but just in case you haven’t — this is your last chance to preorder the book and get the exclusive bonus content that was cut last minute. That content includes:

• Me on Len Barker’s perfect game

• Michael Schur on the greatest performance he ever saw live.

• Me on George Carlin’s Baseball and Football

All you have to do is preorder the book — and if you preorder from Amazon, the book should be delivered on Tuesday, which is launch day — and then sign up for the bonus content. Super simple!

We’ve been talking about — and will continue to talk about — the wild and wooly MVP race in the National League. It reminds me a lot of the way baseball fans used to follow batting races.

We all know that batting average has lost so much of its cachet, and that’s as it should be since other statistics are so much better at measuring hitting prowess, BUT those batting races used to be so much fun. I mean, there aren’t many stories more fun than the 1910 Chalmers Award race between Nap Lajoie and Ty Cobb; I’ve written about that many times including in The Baseball 100.

But even in my childhood there were spectacular batting races involving wonderful characters like Ken Griffey and Bill Madlock and Rod Carew and Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn and George Brett and Willie Wilson and Pete Rose and so on. I do miss us caring about batting races.

This National League MVP race has that same flavor, that same daily thrill, even if the winner will be chosen by voters rather than decided by mathematics. Today, we’ll have Game 4 of this electrifying Dodgers-Braves series and, seriously, let’s just put these two teams in the World Series now. Even though the Braves have won the first three games, each one has been its own epic with twists and turns and grand performances, and it’s so wonderful I just want an IV to pump it directly into my bloodstream.

Game 1, you will remember, Acuña hit a grand slam and also stole a base and his top MVP rival Mookie Betts hit two home runs.

Game 2, Acuña hit a double, a home run, and stole another base … Betts could not quite match up (he went 0-for-3).

And then, Saturday, Game 3, Betts walked and scored a run, Freddie Freeman singled and walked, and Acuña went 1-for-5. The hero of the game was actually Orlando Arcia, who hit a three-run homer in the 10th; in many ways, Arcia is the perfect representation of this absurd Atlanta team. He can’t hit. Everybody knows he can’t hit. He was a highly touted rookie for Milwaukee — a top 10 prospect across baseball — and he was up in the big leagues at 21. His defense was pretty close to elite. His offense — not so much. He had a 73 OPS+ in his five or so seasons with Milwaukee, and the Brewers unloaded him to Milwaukee for The Wire character Chad Sobotka and Eminent Professor of History at Yale Patrick Weigel.

Arcia did hit somewhat better in part-time duty for the Braves, but I don’t know many people who thought it was going to work, making him an everyday player after the Braves lost Dansby Swanson in free agency. There were rumors galore that Atlanta would go hard after Trea Turner or Carlos Correa or some established shortstop star. But they went with Aracia.

And this year? Arcia is hitting .282/.336/.454, a 110 OPS+, and he has 17 home runs, and he made the All-Star team, and he’s playing good defense (not as good as Swanson, but he’s outhitting Swanson this year), and this is just the sort of thing that seems to happen for good teams.

Acuña even impressed himself with that shot (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

But back to Acuña. As I said, he went 1 for 5 … but that 1, well, I’ve never seen anything quite like that 1. There is math to back this up; that home run was measured at 121.2 mph off the bat — the hardest-hit ball of the season and one of only four home runs in Statcast’s history measured at more than 120 mph.

The other three are:

• Giancarlo Stanton’s 121.7 mph laser beam against Texas in 2018.

• Giancarlo Stanton’s 121.3 mph blast in an empty ballpark in 2020.

• Aaron Judge’s 121.1 mph hammer at Yankee Stadium in 2017.

Acuña’s home run is different, though, different because he isn’t a Yankee, but also different because those other two shots were pulled. It registers better in the mind when you see a savage home run pulled; it makes sense to us. Acuña’s homer was not pulled — it was hit to straightaway center, and it was hit on a humid LA evening when the ball famously doesn’t carry well, and the speed with which it left the park just doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t even understand it.

The Dodgers centerfielder James Outman made a cursory effort to go back (even though there was no chance for an out, man) and the ball is over his head before he can even take a step back. The distance was estimated at 454 feet, which is all well and good, but it was moving so fast that if it hit the street, it would have bounced and rolled to Seattle. That hit, like Acuña himself, boggled the mind.

This MVP race is still open. Mookie leads Acuña in both Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference WAR because of his superior defense and 30-or-so-point lead in slugging. But in this series between giants, it is Acuña who has thrown the brightest bolts of lightning and cracked the loudest thunderclaps, and I imagine the voters will remember that.

Then again, the series isn’t over yet.