If you’ve watched the Braves this season you’re seeing double. After double. After double….
The Braves led the National League with 60 doubles in 25 games entering Saturday, a franchise-record for doubles before the end of April and 25 percent more than the league’s next-highest doubles total, the Pirates’ 48. The Cubs and Dodgers each had 47 before Saturday.
The Braves’ Ozzie Albies and Freddie Freeman had 11 doubles apiece, tied with the Yankees’ Miguel Andujar for the major-league individual lead entering Saturday and tied for the highest before-May total in Braves franchise history, matching the 11 by Hank Aaron in 1969, Marcus Giles in 2003 and Nick Markakis in 2016.
Albies was the individual major league leader with 20 extra-base hits entering Saturday, already a franchise record for extra-base hits before May and only three shy of the major league record set by Jermaine Dye when the former Brave played for the Royals in 2000.
When Albies and Braves phenom Ronald Acuna each had a homer and a double Thursday at Cincinnati – Acuna’s second game since being called up from Triple-A -- they became the youngest duo to pull off that feat since the great Ted Williams and Bobby Doerr did it for the Red Sox on July 4, 1939.
No other duo involving teammates as young or younger than Albies (21 years, 110 days as of Thursday) had done it in nearly eight decades. Acuna turned 20 on Dec. 18 and is 11 months younger than Albies.
The Braves had two more April games to try adding to their doubles mark Saturday and Sunday at Philadelphia before Monday’s off day in New York. They open a three-game series against the Mets Tuesday to begin May.
Before this year, the franchise record for doubles before May was 56 by the 1998 Braves, who won 106 regular-season games and swept the Cubs in a division series before losing to the Padres in six games in the league championship series.
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