The sign that the 2024 Atlanta Braves season was an injury morass was Sean Murphy getting injured and leaving the first game of the season. The sign of the 2025 Atlanta Braves season that was…really stupid and not fun was Jurickson Profar eating a PED suspension after the first series of the season.
By the time Profar returned, his new team was more or less dead in the water in terms of playoff potential. Profar didn’t really do anything to revive them either – his 1.3 fWAR in 371 PAs, which was only achieved thanks to quite a bit of xwOBA overperformance, was basically standard fare. It was better than Alex Verdugo, but it actually wasn’t Good.
Since he made his MLB debut at the age of 19, Profar has already been foooreeeeeveeer, although his career has been largely unremarkable. It wasn’t until 2018 (at age 25) that he started staying as a regular; before that point, he was at replacement level in over 700 career PAs. (A bit funny, 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 fluctuated between an average regular and something worse. His overall hitting was fine, but he played poor defense at an already low skill position, which lowered his value. He hit a low point in 2023, where his fWAR of -1.6 was the worst mark among all baseball players. (Based on speed, though, he wasn’t the worst. For example, then-teammate Harold Castro managed -1.5 fWAR in just 270 PAs, while it took Profar 521 to reach his -1.6.)
Fortunately for Profar, he had something of a renaissance in 2024, when he broke out offensively (139 wRC+ without even remotely beating his xwOBA) and was downright bad defensively again from his 2023. That, and possibly a lack of anything else to spend money on, led the Braves to sign him to a three-year, $42 million contract before the 2025 season. The Braves “saved” about $6 million as a result of the PED suspension, but Profar is still owed $15 million in 2026 and 2027.
It’s hard to know what to make of Profar’s 2025, other than the fact that I think he ultimately finished more or less where he expected to be (speed-wise), just in a lot fewer games due to the suspension. The fact that it was accompanied by a large xwOBA overperformance could be a concern. Profar’s top line was a 122 wRC+ – better than any mark he achieved except 2024 – and 1.3 fWAR in 371 PAs, which works out to about 2 WAR per 600 PAs. Unfortunately, Profar’s xwOBA was only .322 compared to a .346 wOBA; he actually had a higher xwOBA in each of 2018-2020. Furthermore, his defense landed somewhere between the horror show of 2023 (-13 OAA-based runs in about 800 innings) and the improvement of 2024 (-6 in about 1,200 innings).
With less than 400 PAs and a lengthy layoff, it’s hard to read too much into Profar’s 2025 versus his 2024. The key factor is that his big ‘discovery’ of 2024, which was hitting the snot out of the ball while maintaining a high level of contact, basically didn’t carry over. Profar’s well-above-average exit rate from 2024, a complete departure from the lackluster numbers he posted earlier in his career, dropped below average again in 2025, as did his hard-hit percentage. His strikeout rate didn’t really change and he continued to walk a lot, just like he did in 2024. He chased more than in 2024, but not 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 he can get anything back closer to 2024 without hitting the ball harder, and he definitely didn’t hit the ball hard enough in 2025.
There is nothing strange about the point estimates below. You can then compare it with the green stuff above. Profar will probably play a bit and be average…
… at least, that is stochastically the “safe” bet. While Profar’s ceiling isn’t super high and it doesn’t seem like he should have a very variable outcome, the “problem” is really that he has an absolute disaster scenario with a fair amount of weight (a la earlier in his career and 2013), so that drags down the points estimate in a way that just doesn’t apply to other players who have some sort of skill set they can rely on. Basically, what I mean is that because Profar’s lows can get very low, when he gets an estimate of 1.5-2.0 points, it means that there is also a pretty good high on the other side to counterbalance it. To know:
Basically, there’s a substantially terrible tail on the left that just keeps going. If Profar had a ‘normal’ stop-loss where there was no real chance that he would be substantially below replacement and still get playing time, his points estimate would be much higher.
But he doesn’t, so what you get is a kind of bizarrely skewed distribution where his mode outcome can be quite close to his optimal (reasonable) outcome, but the downside is so bad that you can’t count on him producing that much. I have no idea if Steamer and ZiPS are directly “thinking” something similar, but I will note that as far as ZiPS is concerned, his 20th percentile WAR is below replacement, while he is only joined by Mauricio Dubon, while that is the case. However, ZiPS has its 80th percentile WAR only slightly above 2, and that’s where IWAG completely diverges, as you can see from the above.
Still, he’s basically hitting the ball hard again because it’s not very useful, and he’s already done it once, so… maybe? Please?
Okay, I’ve given you the information. Well, some information. You may have your own data. I hereby ask you:
- Rounded to the nearest fWAR, how much will Jurickson Profar produce in 2026?
- How sure are you of your choice? Go with a scale of 1 to 5, where 3 is “I don’t know, pretty sure,” 5 is certain, and 1 is “I’m in, but I’m not confident in my choice and don’t want it to be likely to be incorrect and affect my ranking in a theoretical ranking so much.”
#Jurickson #Profar #produce