Matt Olson Launches Himself Into the MVP Race
With an MLB-best 43 homers, Atlanta’s first baseman is on pace to shatter the franchise record for home runs while powering a prodigious lineup.
When we think of the Atlanta Braves, there’s no shortage of fearsome sluggers: Hank Aaron, Chipper Jones, Eddie Mathews or, more recently, Freddie Freeman and Ronald Acuña Jr. Current Braves first baseman Matt Olson, however, is launching himself into the MVP race while threatening to shatter the franchise’s highwater marks for power hitting.
After blasting four home runs over the past week, Olson moved past Shohei Ohtani to grab the MLB lead in homers with 43. At his current pace, Olson finds himself potentially flirting with the same 60-homer threshold that reigning AL MVP Aaron Judge surpassed a season ago. And even if that doesn’t happen, Olson is leading an Atlanta team that has only gotten more powerful since it won the World Series with a barrage of well-timed home runs in 2021.
Olson wasn’t part of that Braves squad, having spent the first six seasons of his career with the Oakland A’s, where he established a reputation as a slick-fielding (two Gold Gloves), power hitting (three seasons with at least 29 homers) first baseman in the mold of Freeman. Then came a chaotic sequence in March 2022 that saw the defending champs move on from Freeman and trade for Olson — meaning the newest Brave would be immediately stepping into the shoes of a franchise icon.
Even though Olson was born and raised in the Atlanta area, replacing Freeman wasn’t easy. In a recent interview with Pardon My Take, Olson was asked if he felt any awkward dynamics in finding his way with the post-Freeman Braves.
“I think there was a tad of it,” Olson said. “When a guy is there that long and he’s going to be a Hall of Famer, the dude is a career .300 hitter with all the accolades that he’s gotten and he came up with the Braves, there’s going to be that stuff.”
It didn’t help that Olson’s numbers dipped relative to both Freeman’s and his own from the previous year. While Olson did hit 34 home runs, he did it with a lower OPS+ (119 versus 153) and fewer Wins Above Replacement (3.3 versus 5.4) than in 2021. And instead of ripping through the postseason as an underdog, the Braves were eventually ousted as a favorite. (This wasn’t exactly Olson’s fault; he had a 1.363 OPS in the Division Series loss to Philadelphia.)
This season, Olson is producing like the player Atlanta brought in to fill Freeman’s cleats — and then some.
Olson is on pace for 6.6 WAR, which would be the second-most by any player who primarily played (i.e., had at least half of their appearances at) first base in Braves history, trailing only Aaron’s 7.2 in 1971. (Yes, Hammerin’ Hank played 71 out of 139 games at first that year, while also logging 60 games at his familiar spot in right field.) Just as impressively, Olson’s pace of 59 home runs would be just the second 50-homer season in Braves history — and it would clear Andruw Jones’ previous mark of 51 from 2005 by nearly double-digits. It isn’t often that a major franchise record for a team that has existed since the 1870s is demolished the way Olson might take a wrecking ball to it this season.
Olson is hardly a lock to win the NL MVP — his odds lag far behind those of his own teammate, Acuña, who also leads him in WAR by a considerable margin. (DraftKings Sportsbook even gives better MVP odds to Freeman, now leading the Dodgers.) And that’s fair, since Acuña’s presence atop the Braves’ lineup — with his .421 OBP and MLB-best 55 steals — distracts opposing pitchers and gives plenty of RBI opportunities to Olson, who has hit either second or fourth in 112 of Atlanta’s 118 games.
The MVP discussion aside, Olson typifies the Braves’ monster home run-hitting performance this year. Five other members of Atlanta’s lineup — Acuña, Ozzie Albies, Austin Riley, Marcell Ozuna and Sean Murphy — are on pace to hit at least 27 home runs, which would combine with Olson’s output to break the 2019 Minnesota Twins and Houston Astros, 2018 New York Yankees and 1956 Cincinnati Reds’ four-way record for the most players (5 apiece) with that many HRs on a single team in a season. The Braves have already set similar records in recent seasons (they are one of only two teams in history whose entire infield hit at least 27 homers), but this year’s version is taking the power-hitting to new heights.
That’s especially true if we look at how the home runs from Olson and company are driving the Braves’ offense, which ranks first in MLB in runs per game and OPS+. According to SportRadar data, 53.7% of Atlanta’s runs this season have come by way of the long-ball, which is tracking to be the largest share by a team in a full season since at least 1974 (the earliest season for which SportRadar has this data.) The 2020 Cincinnati Reds scored an astonishing 59.7% of their runs via the HR, but they did it in a pandemic-shortened, 60-game campaign.
The temptation might be to wonder if this is a bad thing for the Braves’ World Series aspirations, because the offense might not have a fallback plan if the bats cool down. (See the 2019 Twins as an example of a team whose reliance on the homer haunted them in the postseason when home runs were suspiciously harder to come by all of a sudden.) But the Braves need look no further than their own recent history for reassurance that a dinger-driven offense can win the playoffs: The 2021 Braves scored 58.5% of their postseason runs via homers from the likes of Freeman, Eddie Rosario, Adam Duvall, Joc Pederson and World Series MVP Jorge Soler. That rate is tied with the 2022 Houston Astros for second among all-time champs, trailing only the 1956 Yankees (who scored an incredible 72.7% of their postseason runs via homers).
And if Olson keeps raking, the question of whether Atlanta relies too much on homers will become moot anyway. Because when it comes to good things like a hometown player coming into his own as an MVP candidate by hitting bomb after bomb, you can never have too much.
Filed under: Baseball