Prior entries:
- Matt Olson
- Michael Harris II
- Ozzie Albies
- Bryce Elder
- Austin Riley
- Drake Baldwin
- Ronald Acuña Jr.
- Chris Sale
- Spencer Strider
The portent of the 2024 Atlanta Braves season being a morass of injuries was Sean Murphy getting hurt and leaving the first game of the season. The portent of the 2025 Atlanta Braves season being…
really dumb and no fun was Jurickson Profar eating a PED suspension after the first series of the season.
By the time Profar came back, his new team was more or less dead in the water as far as playoff potential. Profar also didn’t really do anything to revive them — his 1.3 fWAR in 371 PAs, which was only achieved due to a fair bit of xwOBA overperformance, was basically a bog-standard rate. It was better than Alex Verdugo, but it wasn’t actually good.
Career-to-date, status
Because he made his MLB debut at age 19, Profar has been around foooreeeeeveeeer, though his career was largely nondescript. He didn’t start sticking as a regular until 2018 (at age 25); he was replacement level in over 700 career PAs before that point. (A minorly funny thing was that he spent all of 2014 and 2015 in the minors. In 2013, he had 324 PAs and a 75 wRC+. In 2016, he had 307 PAs and a 75 wRC+. Heh.) After getting regular playing time, he largely oscillated between being an average regular and something worse. His aggregate hitting was fine, but he played poor defense at an already-low skill position, which tanked his value. He hit rock bottom in 2023, where his -1.6 fWAR was the worst mark among anyone in baseball. (He wasn’t the worst on a rate basis, though. For example, then-teammate Harold Castro managed -1.5 fWAR in just 270 PAs, while it took Profar 521 to “rack up” his -1.6 mark.)
Fortunately for Profar, he had a renaissance of sorts in 2024, as he broke out offensively (139 wRC+ without outhitting his xwOBA by any meaningful amount) and even went back to just plain bad defensively relative to his 2023. That, and potentially a lack of anything else to spend moolah on, led the Braves to sign him to a three-year, $42 million contract ahead of the 2025 season. The Braves “saved” about $6 million as a result of the PED suspension, but Profar is still owed $15 million in each of 2026 and 2027.
Recent performance
It’s hard to know what to make of Profar’s 2025, other than the fact that I guess, in the end, he more or less ended up where he was expected to be (rate-wise), just in a lot fewer games due to the suspension. The fact that it came with a big xwOBA overperformance could be a concern. Profar’s topline was a 122 wRC+ — better than any mark he achieved other than 2024 — and 1.3 fWAR in 371 PAs, which is right around 2 WAR per 600 PAs. Unfortunately, Profar’s xwOBA was just .322 compared to a .346 wOBA; he actually had a higher xwOBA in each of 2018-2020. In addition, his defense ended up somewhere between the horrorshow that was 2023 (-13 OAA-based runs in about 800 innings) and the 2024 improvement (-6 in about 1,200 innings).
With fewer than 400 PAs and a lengthy layoff, it’s hard to read too much into Profar’s 2025 vis-a-vis his 2024. The key factor is that his big “discovery” from 2024, i.e., just whacking the snot out of the ball while continuing to make a high rate of contact, basically didn’t carry over. Profar’s well-above-average exit velocity from 2024, a total divergence from the slappy numbers he posted earlier in his career, once again declined to below-average in 2025, as did his hard-hit rate. His strikeout rate didn’t really change, and he continued to a walk a ton, like he did in 2024. He chased more than in 2024 but not any more than earlier in his career. He was more passive than before (like many of his teammates), and also made even more contact than before. Fundamentally, though, it’s hard to believe that he can regain something closer to 2024 without straight-up hitting the ball harder, and he absolutely did not hit it hard enough in 2025.
Forecasting
There’s nothing that weird in the point estimates below. You can compare then with the green stuff above. Profar will probably play a bit, and be average-y…
… at least, that’s the “safe” bet stochastically. In reality, while Profar’s ceiling isn’t super-high and it seems like he shouldn’t be a very variable outcome guy, the “problem” is that he has an absolute disaster scenario with reasonable weight (a la earlier in his career, and 2013), so the point estimate is dragged down by that in a way that just isn’t true for other players, who have some sort of skillset floor they can rely on. Basically, what I’m saying is that because Profar’s lows can get very low, when he gets a 1.5-2.0ish point estimate, that means there’s also a pretty good high on the other end to counterbalance. To wit:
Basically, there’s a substantially horrible tail on the left side that just kind of keeps going. If Profar had a “normal” stop-loss that didn’t involve a real chance that he’d be substantially below replacement and continue to get playing time anyway, his point estimate would be much higher.
But, he doesn’t, so what you get is this sort of bizarrely-skewed distribution where his mode outcome might be pretty close to his optimal (reasonable) outcome, yet the downside is just so bad that you can’t bank on him producing all that much. I have no idea if Steamer and ZiPS “think” something similar directly, but I do note that as far as ZiPS goes, his 20th percentile WAR is below replacement, where he’s joined only by Mauricio Dubon with that being the case. ZiPS, though, does have his 80th percentile WAR as being only slightly above 2, which is where IWAG totally diverges as you can see from the above.
Still, he’s basically “hit the ball hard again” away from being quite useful, and he already did it once, so… maybe? Please?
Your turn
Alright, I’ve given you the info. Well, some info. You may have your own info. With that, I ask you:
- Rounded to the nearest fWAR, how much will Jurickson Profar produce in 2026?
- How confident are you in your choice? Go with a scale from 1-5, where 3 is “I dunno, reasonably confident,” 5 is certain, and 1 is “I am participating but have no confidence in my choice and don’t want the fact that it will likely be incorrect to affect my place in any theoretical standings all that much.”
