Last week, the Atlanta Braves finally checked into the free agent scene, signing switch-hitting outfielder Jurickson Profar to a 3-year, $42M contract. Until that acquisition, the Braves were virtually radio-silent this winter, losing contributors Max Fried, Travis d’Arnaud, and A.J. Minter to the open market after a trying season that saw many of their core pieces deal with long-term injuries. They are seeking big-time redemption in 2025. Profar will be expected to be a central figure in that mission, as he currently projects to join forces with Michael Harris II and Ronald Acuna Jr. in the outfield. The best versions of those players would easily give the Braves one of the premier outfield trios in baseball, but there’s a lot that makes Profar difficult to predict going into the season.
In a deep and expensive class, Profar has a case to be the most intriguing free agent signing of the offseason. He’s coming off a 2024 that saw him set career-highs in hits, home runs, and all across his triple-slash line. He also earned the first all-star, silver slugger, and down-ballot MVP votes of his major league tenure. Of course, career years are not uncommon for players set to enter free agency, but this one is not without asterisks. Stat-heads may remember that in 2023, Profar was the worst player in baseball by the measure of Fangraphs WAR. How did he go from that to securing a top-15 finish in NL MVP voting in just one season? Where does his true talent level lie in between these two seasons chalked full of extremes? After many weeks of inactivity, were the Braves right to make this their first statement move of the winter?
Profar’s 2024
When a hitter’s results are taken into question, it’s usually because of suspect underlying metrics. That’s not what happened with Profar this past season, though. He did a lot of things that were tough to fake: He hit the ball hard, was rarely overmatched in the strike zone, didn’t strike out, and walked a lot.
This offensive approach ultimately produced a .280 hitter that hit 24 homers and was worth 4.3 Fangraphs WAR despite some deficiencies in the field. Profar was also situationally clutch, finishing the season with 30 runs of value added thanks to his hitting, as well as a mark of 5.3 for Baseball Savant’s edition of win probability added – both of which were instrumental factors in getting him past 80 RBIs for the first time in his career. His OPS exceeded .800 against both left and right-handed pitching, and for most of the season, the Padres deployed him in one of the first three spots of their batting order. He wasn’t an easy out – he could beat opponents with a run-scoring single just as much as he could with a double or a home run, he didn’t often swing at bad pitches, and he didn’t often swing and miss on good ones.
As such, we can conclude with a fair amount of confidence that this performance wasn’t the result of some obtuse batted ball luck. Sure, Profar’s .302 BABIP was the highest mark of his career, but a .302 BABIP isn’t a big enough outlier to cause legitimate worry. His batted ball profile has always been quite balanced between grounders, fly balls, and line drives – he was around league-average in all three of those rates in 2024 – and he isn’t a speed demon by any stretch, so with those ingredients, a lot would have to go right for him to hit much higher than .300 on balls in play anyhow.
In fact, the only thing that really seems fishy at first glance when looking at Profar’s season-level performance is the fact that he led the National League in hit-by-pitches with 18. Some hitters are notorious for using this method of getting on base to their advantage and crowding the plate to try to put themselves on for the guy behind them, but Profar is not one of those players. He has only ever been hit more than 10 times in a season once, and that was all the way back in 2018. Even if you take away half of those league-leading beanballs from this year, his shiny .380 on-base percentage would have been trimmed by about 15 points. He has a good eye so it’s not like the 100-point difference between his average and his OBP is a total illusion, but there are wiser bets to make than Profar clearing a ~.350 on-base clip by that much again.
Profar Pre-2024
Even though we’ve established there wasn’t much pretending about Profar’s outstanding walk year, the fact still remains that he had a fairly miserable 2023. It was a mystery then, and the unprecedented success he saw during his next trip around the sun only compounds that. After solidifying himself as San Diego’s everyday left fielder in 2022 for the first extended playoff run of his career, Profar signed a one-year, $7.75M deal with the Colorado Rockies in the middle of the following year’s spring training with hopes of performing well at the hitter’s paradise that is Coors Field and securing a bigger payday at season’s end. The logic was sound – a short-term deal in a city with an offense-heavy ballpark, and guaranteed everyday reps on a weaker team. It did not, however, go according to plan and he fell flat on his face, putting up the worst wRC+ (78) of his career for a season in which he played more than 100 games. The thin, mile-high air did nothing to boost his extra-base totals, and the Rockies even waived and released him with a month left in the season. He was claimed back by the Padres and hit well in a 14-game stint there in September, but it bears repeating that it was not enough to escape the dreaded last place on the Fangraphs WAR leaderboard before the end of the year.
The fact that Profar isn’t an asset defensively means that if he doesn’t hit, he’s likely going to be costing his team wins relative to any prototypical replacement, and while hitting is certainly something he did not do in 2023, a deeper look at the underlying numbers shows us that he probably wasn’t 78-wRC+-level-bad.
There’s a common theme in the graphic above. No, Profar wasn’t a free swinger and flailing at garbage all year. No, he wasn’t entirely impatient as he was walking at a rate just under 10%, which isn’t bad by any stretch. He was even making contact on pitches in the zone and had a below-average variance of launch angles on the balls he put in play, which are two skills that most major leaguers need to hit for a good average as he would end up doing in 2024. What he did have was a season-long power outage, to the point where he was still a net-negative when swinging on pitches in the zone despite adequate contact rates. There was a clear objective for himself and the Padres hitting coaches going into last winter, and that was to get him to maximize every bit of power in that swing. The rest of the seeds were already planted; he was never completely lost up there. We know now that he accomplished this (more on how later).
Still, why was a 4-WAR outfielder set to enter his age-32 season with a multi-layered offensive approach unable to secure more than $50M on the open market? The answer lies in the age-old law of averages. Profar is a former top prospect who had one of the better rebound seasons you’ll ever see from a major league hitter, but he has never been able to put consecutive good seasons together at the MLB level.
No matter how good the underlying numbers were, it’s impossible to dance around the fact that Profar, at age 31, did a whole bunch of things this season that he had never done in his MLB career. Career years past 30 are seldom indicative of future performance, and his impeccable year-on/year-off trend doesn’t help his case. It’s also not as though he’s consistent within seasons either, regardless of how he’s playing. Since his power stroke was the biggest driving force behind his breakout season, we’ll use hard hit rate as a measuring stick to further convey just how up-and-down he is. Breaking it down by month, it becomes clear that sustaining high exit velocities has been a career-long challenge that is undoubtedly tied to the fluctuation in his results. Especially in 2021 and 2023 (which were two below-average seasons for him with the bat), his hard hit% line chart creates an uncanny “M” shape, and even with the considerable rise in 2024, it’s evident that he can’t quite stay in a groove for too long at the plate.
Even beneath the surface, you won’t find many red flags if you only look at 2024 to project Profar’s short-term future. At the same time, though, his career trajectory to this point raises concerns. Before last season, Profar was not a power hitter and he boasted a mere .238 career batting average. That doesn’t leave much to be encouraged by, but the Braves are obviously convinced that one good season was worth the three-year investment. Let’s dig deeper into what they believe in, why they believe in it, and whether he’ll live up to their expectations.
Projecting Profar’s 2025
A breakout season of this magnitude in the eleventh season of a big league hitter’s career doesn’t happen for no reason. Much was made, especially early in the 2024 season, about how Profar made noticeable changes to his batting stance and added a more pronounced leg kick to his swing compared to the year prior. However, as MLB.com’s Mike Petriello dutifully notes, this was not even close to being the first time that Profar has tweaked his mechanics at the plate. I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the Braves’ hitting lab as they are just a year removed from one of the most prolific offensive seasons a team has had in recent memory, and even though their entire hitting coach personnel has changed since then, this is an organization that has proven they can get the most out of their bats. They did, after all, win the 2021 World Series after shaking up their lineup at the trade deadline in the wake of losing Ronald Acuna Jr. to a torn ACL. Atlanta’s top brass is buying into the tangible changes we saw from Profar in 2024, and their track record suggests the Braves aren’t a bad destination for him if he’s hoping to work closely with a coaching staff that will help him maximize his potential.
Again, though, cases of hitters sustaining a dramatic early-30s breakout year following a payday in free agency are so few and far between. Fangraphs has currently released the results of two proprietary player projection models for 2025. Steamer, a projection model that has been popular amongst the sabermetric community for years, has Profar slashing .260/350/.408, recording 18 home runs and a 113 wRC+. This would be tied for the second-best wRC+ of his career with the shortened 2020 season. Their newest projection system, OOPSY (no, that’s not an abbreviation for anything – feel free to read creator Jordan Rosenblum’s writeup here if you’re interested) is less optimistic: It estimates a .249/.337/.390 slash line, 16 home runs, and a 104 wRC+ for Profar in 2025. Taking defense and baserunning into account, Steamer projects Profar to have a 1.9-WAR season, compared to OOPSY’s 1.2.
Both of those hypothetical scenarios see Profar coming down to earth a fair bit this coming season, and while it may be puzzling to see given the underlying legitimacy of his stellar 2024, it’s much more in line with his prior career standards. I don’t always agree with private projection systems like Steamer and OOPSY often because they’re too conservative which, in fairness, is by design. Yet, those results are ultimately pretty close to what I would’ve expected from Profar in 2025 if I were to make an arbitrary guess. In that case, his $14M salary for the next 3 years wouldn’t look like a bargain – but it wouldn’t be an overpay either.
At this point, it’s fair to call Profar an MLB veteran, and he’s an interesting case study whose 2024 season seems harder to make a verdict on the more we investigate both it and the journey that took him there. He’s a fantastic example of why looking at gaudy underlying numbers and assuming a player’s suddenly newfound success is sustainable is a careless judgment to make. He may have a wider range of possible outcomes to his 2025 season, and for that matter, the next two in his contract, than any free agent signing from this winter. On the other hand, though, his performance this past year will go down as one of the better single-season improvements in the history of baseball. It’s an admirable story for a former top prospect who, after debuting at age 19, battled through years of injury trouble and underperformance to finally earn his first all-star nod and recognition from America’s baseball writers at age 31. This payday was a long time coming for Profar, but if the Braves can re-establish their knack for talent evaluation and he can become even two-thirds of the player throughout his contract that he was in 2024, then he will have been more than worth every penny. As for Profar himself, then, it will certainly have been worth the years of unrealized potential.