Ozzie Albies was not so long ago one of the better second basemen in the game. The situation in 2025 makes that statement such a distant memory that one can’t help but ponder how quickly a player’s status might change.
One of the primary reasons why the Atlanta Braves have been a disappointing offense this season is that Albies is on pace for the worst numbers of his career. That’s a rather impressive feat if we account for how inconsistent he’s been since his call-up in 2017.
Oftentimes, we exaggerate criticism based on what we expect out of a certain player. The issue with Albies is not that he is performing slightly below expectations; it is that he’s been bad enough to the point that a less-established player might have already been replaced.
In the final week of June, there are a little under 20 qualified hitters whose primary position is second base, and the only one with a worse wRC+ than Ozzie Albies (76) is Luis Rengifo. Albies is also the only one on the list with an xwOBA under .300.
There is not a lot going right for Albies in the realm of fantasy production, but firstly, let’s go through the few things that are. For starters, Albies is still running at virtually the same rate he has in his entire career, with the exception of a 20 SB campaign back in 2021. Keeping up his current pace, with already seven stolen bases on hand, Albies should be somewhere around 13 at the end of the year. Now, while this isn’t anything to write home about, for a player who relies on the overall body of work to provide value rather than any single outstanding trait, you take what you can get.
While the hitting line isn’t anywhere near what you’d like it to be, Albies’ plate discipline seems in order, so that hasn’t been a big issue this year. The 17.0 K% is a little high from the number he had last year, but it’s virtually in line with his career mark (16.9%). Chasing less than he ever has, Albies has an 8.5 BB%, which would be the highest he has put up since 57 games as a rookie back in 2017.
Albies has never been a guy that hits the ball particularly hard, instead relying primarily on optimal batted ball data to get the most of his abilities, but the quality of contact has diminished even for his standard, creating a difficult challenge. Albies is currently on pace for basically or at least close to career lows in exit velocity, fly ball exit velocity, max exit velocity, and even barrel rate.
Bat speed hasn’t been tracked for long, but even that has systematically gone down for Albies from 70.0 MPH in 2023 to 69.1 to 68.4.
Making use of our PL Pro tools, you’ll realize that Albies has the highest zDIV in baseball at 135. The oDIV is pretty bad at 80, but to a certain degree, that’s to be expected since Albies is a pretty aggressive guy with the bat.
The decisions Albies is making at pitches inside the strike zone are great, but the lack of thump in his at-bat severely diminishes his ability to do much damage. Furthermore, in comparison with the league average, Albies is better at making contact out of the zone (66.35 O-Con% and 79th percentile) than in the zone (78.0% Z-Con% and 66th percentile).
One of the first things we look for when evaluating a player’s ability to improve or come down is the path to getting there, as these things don’t happen out of nowhere. It’s reasonable to expect a young hitter to improve swing decisions as time passes, whether that’s solving a problem of being too passive or too aggressive. When we look at Albies and the reason he hasn’t been successful, there’s no easy fix here. In fact, there’s not much of a reasonable one, as hitting the ball harder isn’t much of an instruction.
Sure, the pop-up rate is a little higher than usual at 17.7% as he’s getting under the ball a lot, and that’s eating up some of the fly balls. However, even with some positive regression, Albies has a long way to go before being even remotely productive for a fantasy team.
The issue is that, although it’s noticeable that it has reached such a low level, Albies’ underperformance isn’t a surprise. For the majority of recent campaigns, three of the last four, if we include this year, the Braves second baseman has put up well below league-average numbers. Now that 2023 was magical, but it’s looking more like an off campaign than the standard.
Obviously, there is a significant aspect of performance tied to this, but part of Albies’ value in that 2023 campaign came from outside factors no longer in play. For starters, Ozzie batted primarily second for one of the more prolific offenses we’ve ever seen. This year, he’s batted mostly fifth and sixth for a below-average attack.
Even if we account for that amazing campaign, here is the average line for Albies since the start of 2022:
.256/.313/.432
This would mark a drastic improvement on what we’ve seen from him so far, but even if we got it, it’d probably not be enough to justify the great expectations placed on him before the year. Anything more than this requires an unhealthy level of optimism.
We’re talking about a solid enough hitter, but the 60.53 ADP he had in NFCB coming into the year had a lot more to do with the ceiling of a 2023 season that looks like an outlier at this point.
There is still room for Albies to be a valuable piece on your fantasy roster if he can turn things around. Even now, though, amidst career-low numbers, the mention of his name might bring up the notion of a player that most of the time we haven’t really seen.
