The Braves didn’t make many notable changes to their roster between 2024 and 2025 — what they changed was largely under the hood, so to speak, with some pretty awful results. That said, the one guy they did add, Jurickson Profar, could’ve been read as a portent of those under-the-hood changes. Profar was suspended for PED use shortly after the season began; when he returned, he had an okay half-season that was marked by weirdness as much as anything else.

How acquired

The Braves and left field are not two peas in an agreeable pod. From 2018 through 2024, the team ranked 20th in overall fWAR from left field, and slipped firmly into the bottom ten afterwards, with a nearly-unbroken downward trend of one ranking spot per year moved forward. As much of the team moved towards a consistent-slash-ossified-depending-on-your-point-of-view relationship towards position player usage, the Braves opted to give Profar a $42 million, three-year deal on January 23, 2025. Assuming that Profar didn’t get waylaid by injury or similar (ahahah), he was on track to be the team’s first full-time left fielder since Justin Upton in 2014.

What were the expectations?

It’s way too long to go into an overall summary of Profar’s multifaceted career here, but let’s try to breeze through it. He made his MLB debut in 2012 as a 19-year-old, but was up and down and unproductive for years until a solid season in 2018 that was largely solid only because he outhit his xwOBA. When that didn’t happen for the next three years, he ranged from below average to awful, until he had a nice defensive year in 2022 that gave him a then-career-high 2.5 fWAR. He turned that into a one-year, $7.75 million deal with the Rockies that proved disastrous, worst-player-in-baseball territory; the Rockies released him partway through the year and he rejoined the Padres.

Then came 2024, more or less the reason the Braves signed him. Playing a $1 million, one-year deal that nonetheless garnered Profar a starting role, he had a massive breakout-ish season at age 31, putting up 4.3 fWAR while not outhitting his xwOBA, as he substantially improved his contact quality without losing the strikeout and walk rates that had ensured he wasn’t completely useless at the plate even when he was largely slapping at the ball.

For more on expectations on Profar, see here, which was put together less than a week after he signed. His 2024 season was such a turnaround that it made having confidence in any single point estimate difficult. A guy that had put up 5.3 fWAR in his last three years heading into his age-32 season seemed like a below-average regular, but of course, that obscures the fact that Profar was fine in 2022, awful in 2023, and great in 2024. Weighting his most recent results more heavily gave Profar about a league-average set of projection point estimates for 2025. He was essentially expected to contribute with the bat enough to not fully erase his value considering his terrible, statue-esque fielding in an outfield corner.

2025 Results

The Braves did not get a full-time left fielder. Beyond that, though, they kind of got what they paid for — just in a roundabout, unclear-if-repeatable, also-somewhat-weird way.

Profar was suspended for 80 games after testing positive for a steroid shortly after the MLB regular season began. The Braves had “depth” behind him in the form of Jarred Kelenic, Bryan De La Cruz, and eventually Alex Verdugo, but all those guys crashed and burned, so not only did the Braves not get Profar in left field for a full year, they also suffered something like a trillion (rough approximation) negative WAR in that spot in his absence.

Profar returned on July 2 and was okay as he got back into the swing of things (98 wRC+), but his batting line went absolutely bonkers in August (183 wRC+), before scuffling to a poor finish (82 wRC+ in September). For the season, he gave the Braves 80 games and 371 PAs, in which he had 1.3 fWAR, a 122 wRC+, and a ghastly -8 OAA-based runs in half a season.

The batting line was propped up by a sizable xwOBA overperformance. Of 242 players with 350+ PAs in 2025, 108 outhit their xwOBA by any amount, only 65 outhit it by .010 or more, only 32 outhit it by .020 or more, and only 22 outhit it by more than Profar’s .023. His .323 xwOBA was more “pretty good” than “great,” but the 122 wRC+ was the fourth-highest mark on the team.

What went right?

Profar’s August was not just the result of an epic xwOBA overperformance lumped into one calendar page. He had a legitimately great .396 xwOBA, though yes, he did outhit it by a bunch (.436 wOBA) as well. He was a top-15 bat by inputs and a top-three bat by outputs in that month.

More broadly, Profar improved on some things that were already propping up his profile. His strikeout rate (15.9 percent) was right in line with his career, but he posted a career-high walk rate (12.9 percent), such that he was one of the best walks-relative-to-strikeouts guys in the majors. While he really didn’t retain many of the incredible gains he made in 2024, there were still places where he showed marked improvement over his pre-2024 self, like a collective .312 xwOBA against breaking pitches. He actually sustained his barrel rate and improved his solid contact rate over 2024, and clearly re-oriented his swing to try to lift the ball far more than ever before. In many ways, he clearly did what the Braves wanted him to do (or just happened to align with the way the whole team shifted), swinging less but making more contact on pitches in the zone… even if that meant dropoffs in contact quality.

Still, even that contact quality dropoff was kind of a bizarre happenstance (we’ll get to that below). His actual power output was pretty good, with 14 homers and a .189 ISO, the second-highest per-PA homer rate and ISO of his career, both higher than 2024.

While he rejoined the team when its travails had largely crossed into irrelevance, he still managed a few big hits. His biggest of the year was a two-out single that gave the Braves a ninth-inning comeback win over the Tigers:

He also had a homer robbery defensively, but it feels a little weird to highlight that given his defensive issues.

What went wrong?

There are a few big things, and then some interesting little things that maybe ameliorate, or at least re-contextualize, some of the big things.

The first one is probably the most obvious: he lost half a season to a PED-related suspension, forcing the Braves to use a progression of horrendous fill-ins, which didn’t tank their season alone, but sure made it nigh-impossible for them to hang on once the injuries also began to pile up. If you assume Profar would’ve produced at the same rate during his suspension period as he actually did after (i.e., about 1.3 WAR), then we’re talking a three-win swing in production just from playing Profar rather than five different sub-replacement level options in left field. Would 41-44 instead of 38-46 on July 2 really mattered? Probably not, especially since the Braves had a five-game losing streak against the Angels, Orioles, and Athletics the day after Profar returned to the lineup. But, by giving Mike Yastrzemski real money this offseason, it looks like they’re committed to not repeating this mistake again.

The second is, well, Profar still can’t really field. The good news is that he wasn’t exactly notably slower in 2025 than in 2024, and both of those had him run faster than 2023. He’s been largely the same well-below-average runner from 2021-onward. He’s also been consistently awful defensively for a while now. A few days ago, I did an exercise for a commentariat request, and Profar’s 2025 value with him playing the field was consistently with his value if he had just been DHing. On the one hand, that’s not a blaring siren for “he needs to DH,” but on the other hand, it means that he’s providing DH-level “defensive value” while being slotted in the field. That’s rough.

Third, Profar’s xwOBA was honestly unimpressive at .322, considering it was .364 the year before. He had a .320s xwOBA in 2018-2019, and a .315 xwOBA in 2022, which were okay-ish years for him — just like his 2025. Okay isn’t bad, but Profar would’ve essentially been a replacement-level player if his wOBA matched his xwOBA, because he contributes nothing on the bases or defensively. His exit velocity went down over 2 mph on average from 2024; his xwOBACON was as bad as it was in 2023 after a notable career high in 2024.

But, on that note, it’s worth pondering briefly the fact that maybe Profar’s season had some weirdness in under 400 PAs that we shouldn’t expect to repeat itself. We know that Profar pulled the ball a lot more than ever before, and hit a lot fewer grounders. Both of those are good things. However, his rate of flares and routine grounders fell substantially. Flares in particular are weird: they’re high-xwOBACON events that are hard to do deliberately. If some of his routine fly balls were more wonkily hit, such that they were wounded quails with a chance to fall in, he’d probably have seen a gain in xwOBACON. It’s hard to fret too much about this because in the end, it’s not like his exit velocity was sustained from 2024, and his HR/FB was not notably low or anything, but fundamentally, you’d expect someone who stopped hitting the ball hard to accidentally “run into” more bloops than Profar ultimately did.

At least Profar’s worst game by WPA (and it was a bad one) didn’t give the team a loss. He hit leadoff in that crazy 12-11 win over the Reds on July 31. His first two PAs were infield pops, then he had a flyout to center. With the game tied and the bases loaded in the sixth, he hit into an inning-ending double play. He then struck out with runners on second and third and none out, though the Braves had a three-run lead at the time. And then, with a chance to redeem himself a bit in the ninth after the Reds answered the Braves’ eight-run eighth with an eight-run eighth of their own, he had a routine groundout to short.

There was also a ton of stuff like this, over and over (and over), but we won’t dwell on it too much. Any ball hit to the left-field foul line seemed to be a guaranteed hit given Profar’s inability to actually get over there. And, given his broad issues going to his left, his positioning more towards the gap made sense… except that it exposed the team to a procession of ridiculous singles and doubles that he couldn’t get to.

2026 Outlook

Profar’s 2026 outlook is kind of like his 2025 outlook, since it’s unclear where he’s going to come down in terms of offensive anything, while his defense is more of a known quantity. If he falls in somewhere between 2024 and 2025 in terms of batting acumen, he can probably be an average regular with bad defense again, a la Steamer’s current point estimate projection. If his defense gets even worse, or if his bat slips, we’re looking at a below-average regular, a la ZiPS’ current point estimate. If both happen, or if he has another weird set of low exit velocities, lack of flares, etc. etc., he could be replacement level. We’ll have to hope that doesn’t happen, but at least the Braves have other options now.