Is this the season Austin Riley becomes an MVP contender?
Fangraphs is releasing their updated ZiPS projections for each MLB team, and our own Jake Mastroianni covered at length about the exceedingly positive outlook for the 2024 Atlanta Braves.
But there's one player that's seemingly getting lost in the discussion of Atlanta's recent success and future projections: Austin Riley.
He's talked about, of course, but the conversations of this Braves team revolve around reigning National League MVP Ronald Acuña Jr, last year's MLB homer leader Matt Olson, and the lethal duo of Spencer Strider and Max Fried atop the rotation. Riley's just...there - a reliable All Star contender and cornerstone of the top part of the lineup.
Riley batted .281/.345/.516 last season, with 37 homers and 97 RBIs.
But it's entirely possible that he can do even more.
Riley's 2024 projection, via ZiPS, is 34 home runs, 103 RBIs, and a slash line of .282/.351/.519, good for the third-best OPS+ on the team at 132.
(For comparison, Acuña is at 164 OPS+ and Olson's at 134)
But there's a few small tweaks that, if they happen for Riley, could absolutely supercharge his production into that MVP candidate realm.
Get back to crushing fastballs
Continue working with Chipper on sliders
His defense is significantly improved, but it's probably not enough
So what's a realistic jump in offensive performance that would get Riley into the MVP conversation?
Well, about that - he's tecnnically already in the MVP conversation, having finished 7th, 6th, and 7th in the last three seasons of voting.
But we're trying to win him the dang thing, right?
There's a few things that need to happen:
The first is a drop in his strikeout rate (and the corresponding bump in his batting average that would come with it.) He's hovered between 23.8% and 25.4% the last four seasons - it doesn't need to be as extreme as Acuña's 12.2% cut, but if Riley can get under 20% (perhaps by less chasing of sliders down and away), it'll raise that batting average enough to get him over .300 on the season.
The 2nd is juicing the homer rate a little (and yes, those two things don't normally both happen together, but we're assuming everything clicks here.) Riley's career average is 5.2%, and that's exactly where he finished in 2023. If he can see that naturally tick up, possibly as a result of turning on more fastballs, that could get him over 40 homers. The only two corner infielders to win the MVP with less than 40 homers was 2010 Joey Votto (37) and 2022 Paul Goldschmidt (37), but both featured on-base percentages over .400 and more than 110 RBIs.
And the third thing is, simply, some luck. That's how baseball awards work. Luck comes and goes - many Cy Young winners have higher FIPs than ERA in the year they win, and many hitters have unusually high BABIP's or some sort of gaudy league-leading stat that gets attention.
But the raw tools are there. Riley's already one of the best hitters in baseball, and with a few tweaks to his production (and a little luck), he can rocket into that conversation rather easily.
Let's see if he can pull it off.
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