How many Braves will hit 30 home runs this year?

August 25th, 2023

This story was excerpted from Mark Bowman’s Braves Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

With and  sitting at 20 homers, it will be interesting to see how many Braves end up hitting 30-plus this year.

Matt Olson went homerless during this past homestand but still leads the National League with 43. Austin Riley (29), Ozzie Albies (28), Ronald Acuña Jr. (28) and Marcell Ozuna (28) could all return from the current 10-game road trip with 30-plus. 

If so, the Braves will match the 2019 Twins as the only teams in history to have five players hit 30-plus homers in the same season. One of the Minnesota players to help set this record was Rosario, who earlier this week said, “I want to break that record.” 

Before this year, the '98 Braves were the only club in franchise history to have four players hit 30-plus homers in the same season. They were Andres Galarraga, Chipper Jones, Andruw Jones and Javy Lopez.

Rosario and Murphy both need to hit 10 homers over the season’s final 36 games to reach the 30-homer mark. That’s challenging even before you account that neither is going to play every game the rest of the way. Murphy will continue sharing the catching duties with Travis d’Arnaud and Kevin Pillar will likely get starts in left field against some left-handed starters.

But it’s certainly possible that neither Murphy nor Rosario gets to 25 homers.

If one of them reaches this mark, the Braves would match the '03 Red Sox (Trot Nixon, Nomar Garciaparra, Kevin Millar, David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and Jason Varitek) and the '19 Twins (Rosario, C.J. Cron, Miguel Sanó, Mitch Garver, Max Kepler and Nelson Cruz) as the only teams that have had six players reach the 25-homer mark in the same season.  

This is the first time the Braves have ever had five players hit 25-plus homers in the same season. The odds of them getting six players to 30 seem long, unless you account for Rosario playing four games next week at Dodger Stadium.

Asked if last weekend’s success against the Giants was a sign that the Dodgers aren’t the only National League West team he loves to torture, Rosario said, “I think they just have bad luck that they catch me at a good moment.”