Folks, it’s Opening Day — for 26 other ballclubs, at least. The Atlanta Braves still have to wait their turn until Friday, which is when they’ll hopefully be able to open up the season by doing some damage against the Kansas City Royals. Ronald Acuña Jr. is going to be starting in right field for this one and it’s safe to assume that there will be plenty of fans wearing some variation of his No. 13 Braves jersey in the stands.
That’s not me speculating, either. MLB just released the list of player jersey sales since the final out of the World Series and Acuña has made the top 20 on that list once again. Acuña’s presence on the list has slid a little bit, though — he was No. 11 on the last list that was released back in September. Now, he’s No. 17 on the most recent list. Again, it’s still top 20 but he’s no longer knocking on the door of the top 10 like he was not all that long ago. In fact, he’s fallen eight spots since this time last year when he was No. 9 on the list, so if you’re the type who is following this type of news with baited breath then I hope you were sitting down while reading this.
Anyways, the best way to get those sales back up would be to have a big year and hopefully that’ll be the case for Acuña as he heads into this upcoming season. He’s looked like his usual, dynamic self during both spring training and the World Baseball Classic so hopefully we’ll see those encouraging signs translate into another big season. Braves beat writer Mark Bowman of MLB.com summed it up best with his quick thoughts on the matter:
I think we’d all be pretty satisfied with Acuña returning to the MVP conversation and that would also bring about the byproduct of more jersey sales, so there’s that. Anyways, if you’ve got an Acuña jersey (or shirsey, even), let us know in the comments section below. I’ll also tack on the full list. There’s no prizes for guessing who was No. 1 on the jersey sales list — again.