The longest-tenured player on the Atlanta Braves looked to rebound from injury in 2025, but instead struggled mightily for more than half the season, bringing into to question his future with the only organization he has known.
How acquired
Ozzie Albies was signed as an international free agent by the Braves in 2013 and made his major league debut with Atlanta on August 1, 2017. About 20 months later, he signed one of the silliest extensions in MLB, securing just $35 million for seven years of service,
with two very cheap club options tacked on as well.
What were the expectations?
From 2020-onward, Albies had alternated good and bad seasons. He was hurt in 2020, but rebounded in 2021; he missed most of 2022 and wasn’t particularly good when healthy, but then had a huge 2023 offensively, even as his defense collapsed. 2024 was a subpar season for him with both and the bat and the glove, which could have suggested another strong campaign in 2025… though that’s not what happened.
Without hindsight, though, it’s safe to say that taking his recent track record heading into 2025 and splitting it down the middle suggested something like an above-average bat with concerning defense at the keystone. That’s pretty much what ZiPS had: below-average defense but a 107 OPS+, good for 2.5 WAR over 500ish PAs as a point estimate.
2025 results
Until a freak hand injury he suffered on the follow-through of a swing with less than a week left in the season, Albies had played in every game in 2025. The results? Well … they ended up not great, to say the least. He posted career-worst 87 wRC+, another below-average defensive year, and 1.3 fWAR for the second year in a row… except it took him 667 PAs to amass the 2025 total while he did so in 435 PAs in 2024.
Fundamentally, Albies’ season was bad enough that despite the hilarity of his 2026 club option ($7 million, with a $4 million buyout), there were still questions about whether it was even worth it to exercise said option. Fortunately, things picked up for Albies a bit, as his July was average offensively and he hit really well in September before the injury ended his season. Still, the rough April and an abysmal June drag down his seasonal line a fair bit.
What went right?
Not much, really. You kind of have to grasp at some particularly-available straws.
His .315 wOBA / .316 xwOBA from July through the end of the season was… fine. (His career xwOBA coming into 2025 was .323.) For the season, he managed to get his walk rate into league-average territory for the first time since his partial rookie season. (Was it worth the price to get there? Absolutely not.) He continued to avoid strikeouts at pretty much the same rate as usual.
After the start of July, Albies looked more like the offensive performer he had been for most of his career. His OPS was .707 in July, .709 in August and .788 in September, a massive improvement the beginning of the season. He hit 10 of his 16 home runs in those three months.
We’re really reaching here, but he posted a 111 wRC+ in high leverage, and a 118 wRC+ with runners in scoring position.
And hey, he was good in some games. He was a one-man offensive show in a 4-3 win over the Mets on August 14: he hit a solo homer to tie the game at one in the fourth, gave the Braves the lead with a single in the sixth, and then knocked in the game-winning run with a double in the eighth:
He also drove in the first three runs the Braves scored in 2025, on a fielder’s choice and a two-run homer, back when things still seemed relatively bright and sunny for this ill-fated team.
What went wrong?
Oh, where to start. Through June, Albies’ season was miserable, even though he actually had a good xwOBA in May (.327). Unfortunately, he underhit it that month, and June 2025 was the worst full month of his career. (A partial month in August 2020 is the only competition.)
Like Michael Harris II, Albies seemed completely felled by a change in approach. Never the most powerful or consistent hitter, he posted a pathetically low barrel rate (lowest since pre-2019), a diminished exit velocity from 2023-2024, and one of the worst xwOBACONs in baseball. Though he swung at way fewer strikes than previously, his chase rate was basically the same as 2024. Whatever the Braves were trying to do didn’t really work: sure, he got more walks, but in exchange for an even slower swing and pathetic contact quality. He gained essentially nothing on non-fastballs, while posting the worst xwOBA-against versus fastballs in his career.
But, perhaps the biggest problem was that despite largely being healthy, Albies did not return to crushing left-handed pitching. In his career, he’s tormented southpaws, except while having injury-plagued seasons in 2020 and 2022. 2024 saw him drop to a .325 xwOBA against lefties, though it was masked by an undeserved .368 wOBA. In 2025, he hit a pedestrian .319 in xwOBA terms against lefties. Meanwhile, his .289 xwOBA against righties was the second-lowest of his career after 2018, so again, whatever he and the Braves were doing, it achieved nothing at all. On top of that, nothing he or the Braves did arrested his massive jump in infield pops in 2024.
Not that anything else came about to make any of this look better. His arm strength continued to be terrible, and he posted his third straight below-average year defensively at second base. Albies has had huge issues going to his right (up the middle) for a few years now, but even going to his left was problematic for him in 2025.
While he was still a positive baserunner overall, he’s also suffered a fairly precipitous decline in sprint speed, going from the 89th percentile to when he was first called up, to the 55th percentile in 2022-2023 (injuries were involved), and then to the 44th/46th percentile in 2024-2025.
There’s more, but there’s no use in piling on because his struggles were evident in almost every corner of his profile. His worst game WPA-wise was the 6-4 loss to the Diamondbacks on April 27, when he went 0-for-5, including a foulout to end the seventh with the bases loaded while down a run, and a flyout to end the game while he was the go-ahead run. And while this worst-on-his-season WPA play against a lefty pitcher was just that, one play, it kind of summarizes everything that went wrong for him in 2025 as a whole:
2026 outlook
Albies heads into 2026 with one more year of possible team control with a $7M club option for 2027 with no buyout. He’ll play next season at 29 years of age, so he should still be somewhere around his peak, but the last two seasons have been a struggle.
It doesn’t seem that likely that he’ll rebound defensively given his arm strength and what’s transpired over the last few years, so there’s a lot more pressure on his bat. Whatever he did in 2024 likely won’t do the trick of making him a worthwhile starting option, but 2025 was even worse. The Braves kind of have to pick and choose whether they want to reinvent the wheel again (even if that reinvention is really just trying to re-assert 2023 from a blank canvas), or double down on the mess that was 2025. If Albies can hit at least decently, it’ll make picking up his final option plausible; if he can’t, maybe the affable infielder will be seeking a new home next offseason.
Projections-wise, Steamer has Albies bouncing back a bit with the bat despite his defensive woes, and playing like an average regular. ZiPS is less sanguine, but still has him around average offensively, and therefore an average-ish contributor overall. Let’s hope he can get there after two pretty disappointing seasons.
There’s also a medium-sized elephant in the room regarding the injury that ended Albies’ season: a hamate bone fracture. These types of injuries are known to linger and sap power, and, well, Albies doesn’t really have too much room for either an injury-related decline, nor diminished power output. Stay tuned for what happens — at least the Braves can garner some defensive value with Mauricio Dubon, now that Ha-Seong Kim has been brought back into the fold to take the reins at shortstop.
