Atlanta Braves: Let’s compare Ronald Acuna to Mike Trout

The Atlanta Braves Ronald Acuna is one of the most exciting prospects in baseball entering the 2018 season and is more like Mike Trout than you might think.

Mike Trout is the best baseball player on the planet. It’s really not even that close. Since 2012, Trout’s first full season in the big leagues, he leads the majors in WAR by nearly 20 wins over second place Josh Donaldson. During that time-span, no one has come close to matching Trout’s production. Mike Trout is rarely even compared to modern players because in today’s game he has no equal. That being said, there is a minor leaguer knocking at the door of the major leagues that many hope will one day be in the same conversation as Trout. That player is none other than Atlanta Braves wunderkind, Ronald Acuna.

Mike Trout is Ronald Acuna’s second most comparable player according to Pecota. That sets some lofty expectations for a player that has yet to take a single major league at-bat. However, Acuna is coming off of an incredible minor league season in which he went from high A to Double-A to Triple-A while improving at each level.

In fact, Acuna’s Atlanta Braves minor league numbers match up pretty well with Trout’s. Using wRC+, we can compare their minor league seasons in the context of their respective leagues and ballparks. I could not find wRC+ for the Arizona Fall League, so I simply used OPS.

Trout had better numbers in the low minors, but Acuna fared better in the upper levels of the Atlanta Braves system. In fact, the only level where Trout was superior in the high minors was in 93 AAA plate appearances.

Another example of Acuna’s dominance was in the Arizona Fall League. Acuna took his performance to yet another level and won the league MVP, while Trout struggled in his time there. Most believe that Trout was just worn down at the end of that season, which makes sense but Acuna had every reason to be just as tired.