92.9 The Game Atlanta Braves insider Grant McAuley joined Dukes & Bell for his daily appearance and talked about the best way for the Braves to use Ronald Acuña Jr. as the season winds down and the playoffs loom.
When asked how the Braves should manage Acuña’s knee down the stretch after his comments last night.
“I think it’s just a little bit of a frustrated player saying an obvious thing which is his knee does not feel good, clearly it doesn’t, we’ve seen how they’ve had to manage him. He just had to have three days off because of the intense pain that he felt in that surgically repaired knee and I think that this is going to be the reality of the situation moving into September and October,” McAuley said. “How he’s feeling is gonna dictate what you’re going be doing with him, where he might be playing, is he gonna be DHing as he is now or if you’re gonna put him in the outfield.”
McAuley talked about what has bothered Acuña’s knee the most.
“I talked to Brian Snitker about this yesterday and he said ‘Look running the bases, stealing bases, even playing the outfield have been some of probably the biggest trouble spots for him in terms of dealing with that knee injury.’ I just feel like it’s something they are just gonna have to manage and I think for Ronald maybe that was just a little bit of tongue and cheek frustration kinda shining through. Because I know that the tone in which I heard and saw the comments was a little bit different than reading ‘hey my knee feels terrible…’ which I think is what caught everybody by surprise initially.”
