What a comeback! What an entrance into the new season — arriving toward the end of May in an attempt to spark an offense that desperately needed awakening. Ronald Acuña Jr. exceeded the expectations of many fans across Braves Country after a full recovery from nearly a year on the IL due to an(other) ACL tear he suffered in the 2024 season. His 2025 performance was truly a bounce-back.

How acquired

International scout Rolando Petit, recognized a deep level of talent the Braves could develop. In 2014, they signed Acuña as an international amateur free agent with a $100,000 bonus. He later made his major league debut against the Cincinnati Reds on April 25, 2018. Less than a year later, he signed a lengthy extension that guaranteed him $100 million over eight seasons, with two $17 million club options. 2025 was the penultimate guaranteed year of the deal, though the Braves will almost certainly exercise both options.

What were the expectations?

Success. It’s fair to say that everyone’s expectations were extremely high after Acuña’s closely observed rehab stints. Fans were eager for his return after enduring the offensive woes of the Atlanta Braves’ production in 2025. There was some apprehension, especially since Braves’ ace Spencer Strider had returned from the Injured List about a month earlier with results that weren’t exactly favorable, particularly in the early stages of his comeback.

There were discussions that the now 28-year-old outfielder might face similar struggles and take time to return to full form. Not only did it take little to no time once he was cleared to play against the San Diego Padres, but he also crushed a 467-foot homer on the very first pitch he saw.

More broadly, what can you really say about expectations and Acuña at this point? He’s a generational talent and threw together a 9.2 fWAR, MVP-winning campaign in 2023, while also putting together a blistering Rookie of the Year campaign in 2018 (4.4 fWAR in 487 PAs), a 5.0 fWAR follow-up in 2019, and a rousing 4.4 fWAR in about half a season in 2021 before tearing an ACL for the first time.

Other seasons were more uneven — just 2.4 fWAR in his 2022 comeback campaign, and a disappointing follow-up where he totaled just 0.9 fWAR in 222 PAs in 2024 before tearing the ACL in his other leg. Everyone knows what Acuña is capable of, but everyone also remembered that his first return season wasn’t to his usual standard of excellence, and his most recent campaign was also relatively lame. Expecting something like 4 WAR, on balance, made sense.

ZiPS had a point estimate of 5.1 WAR in 547 PAs, which seemed sanguine on the playing time front and involved a slightly better batting line than he had posted in his career to date.

2025 Results

If you were hiding under a rock and not witnessing the greatness of Acuña this year, the stats and results alone speak for themselves.

He finished the season with a .161 wRC+ and 3.5 fWAR. In a turnaround from what usually happens to him, he actually outhit his xwOBA a tiny bit — the first time that’s happened since his rookie campaign. Clearly taking it easily in right field, his defensive value took a further tumble… but people are still talking about that cannon of a throw that resulted in an inning-ending double play against the Yankees back in July.

All of this earned him the title of National League Comeback Player of the Year, along with his fifth selection as a starter on the National League All-Star team.

What went right?

Offensively, it’s hard to say that Acuña came back and missed any sort of beat. There wasn’t much of the sour notes of his 2022 campaign (“just” a .366 xwOBA) or his 2024 (.350). While he wasn’t tearing it up on the bases or mashing quite like his 2020-2021 or 2023 self, he was still a top-ten bat in the game. He walked a ton (thanks to, as he would tell you himself, the Braves’ changed offensive approach); only Aaron Judge and Juan Soto had 200-plus PAs in 2025 and a higher walk rate. He continued to be stingy with chasing, and hung tough with basically every offering opposing pitchers threw.

He also stayed relatively healthy, with just a single two-week IL stint for Achilles tendon inflammation.

Acuña’s highest-WPA game of the year was fairly modest for his standards (we’ll get to this later) — about 0.2 WPA in a 4-1 win over the Rockies, where he went 2-for-3 with a walk, a single, and this two-run homer:

Also, here’s him victimizing Rich Hill’s “fast”ball for a monster homer:

What went wrong?

Acuña taking it easy in the outfield was probably fine for his overall health, and certainly wasn’t an issue given that the season was largely lost a few weeks into his return, but it seriously harmed his value. His defense, which had already dropped into below-average territory following his first ACL tear, veered into “horrendous” territory, with -8 OAA-based runs in about two-thirds of a season’s worth of playing time. He also added just one run back with his arm, his lowest total in a non-shortened season since he was neutral in that regard as a rookie.

The other thing that went wrong was also irrelevant in the grand scheme of the Braves’ season, and was just one of those crazy curiosities that comes up and doesn’t get a lot of focus in a lost season.

Up through 2020, Acuña had an unsurprising lack of a leverage split at all. This was also true in 2023, when he was just devouring pitchers’ souls. But in the other years since 2020 — 2021, 2022, 2024, and last year, for whatever reason, Acuña has had a nightmarish time as leverage gets extreme. In 2025, this culminated in a -2.24 clutch score — literally the worst in baseball for any batter that took even a single plate appearance. The actual breakdown of this is bizarre and horrible: Acuña had a 187 wRC+ in low leverage, a 164 wRC+ in medium leverage, and a -11 wRC+ (.077/.273/.077) in high leverage. Sure, the latter was just 33 PAs, and his BABIP in those situations was a paltry .125, but still, brutal. Without going into a very deep dive, the issue was fundamentally that pitchers were absolutely not going to pitch to him with the game on the line, and while that inflated his already-ridiculous walk rate, it also led to more chases and suboptimal contact as he tried to make things happen.

This sort of thing is probably best-evinced from a game on July 13, a one-run loss to the Cardinals. Acuña struck out three times in a row with men on base, and then grounded out with the tying and go-ahead runs on base in the ninth. The first two strikeouts were on fastballs off the plate away, and the third was on a spiked curveball nowhere near the zone. For whatever praise Acuña heaped on the approach in helping him to walk more, he didn’t always stick to it in key situations. And sometimes, it broke the other way:

2026 Outlook

After a year of lineup shuffling and being removed from the leadoff spot in July, the Braves’ new manager, Walt Weiss, announced that he is open to Acuña batting leadoff again in 2026. In fact, the word he used was “enticing,” according to MLB.com beat guy Mark Bowman.

“It’s enticing to have him at the top of the order,” Weiss said. “I really like when a lineup turns over, and there’s teeth right away. If you’re a pitcher, you’ve got to run through a gauntlet as soon as the lineup turns over,” per MLB.com.

As for the rest of the 2026, there’s a lot to look forward to. Fans — and likely the team as well — are expecting Acuña to have a healthy season after finishing one, and to continue building on the comeback year he delivered in 2025. Even factoring in the possibility that he gets hurt again, something like a 4-5 WAR season seems relatively obvious given the rate he was able to produce without really stealing bases, and jogging in the outfield, in 2025. Steamer has him exceeding 5 WAR provided he can stay on the field all season; ZiPS has essentially the same on a rate basis but has a point estimate of closer to 500 PAs. The Braves have succeeded without Acuña before, but having him around will make their quest to return to the postseason that much easier.