Urshela was woeful with the Tigers, but made a more-than-commendable effort filling in for Austin Riley down the stretch
For my money, the straw the broke the camel’s back for the Braves with regard to injury Austin Riley breaking his hand after being hit by a pitch in August. It was a crushing blow to one of the few players still hitting in the lineup, and it came after the Trade Deadline, all but tying the hands of Alex Anthopoulos. Thankfully, Gio Urshela fell into the team’s lap just days after Riley was lost for the season, and though it seemed like a nothingburger at the time given how bad Urshela was with the Tigers, he actually played really well down the stretch.
How acquired
Urshela was released by the surging Detroit Tigers on Sunday, August 18 — the same day Riley broke his hand in Anaheim. Two days later, Urshela found himself in Atlanta’s lineup.
Urshela had signed a major league deal for just $1.5 million with Detroit back in February; the Braves ended up paying him just the pro-rated amount of league minimum for his services down the stretch.
What were the expectations?
Urshela was quite bad with Detroit over 92 games prior to being let go. He was hitting just .241/.286/.333 (76 wRC+) and found himself falling out of favor with manager AJ Hinch. He actually had a not-nearly-as-bad-as-a-76-wRC+ .304 xwOBA, though that still wasn’t a good mark.
The Braves, however, were desperate after losing Riley and would have taken anything. Urshela was a known name who was once good-ish with the Yankees a few years ago, and fine enough with the Twins back in 2022 — something the club didn’t exactly have sitting around on the bench or in Gwinnett — and could feasibly perform better than Luke Williams, Nacho Alvarez Jr., or whoever else they had internally.
It’s kind of a weird thing where a guy who was replacement level over his prior 325 PAs was somehow a potential upgrade to a contender’s roster, but that’s where the Braves were.
2024 results
The bar was low, but it’s fair to say Urshela cleared it. He hit a perfectly fine .265/.287/.424 (95 wRC+) and graded out well defensively over 36 games. There were still issues at the plate — a measly 2.9 walk rate and four homers over 136 plate appearances won’t make Brian Snitker do cartwheels — but the Braves were so desperate for anything at the bottom of the order that you have to take what he gave the team as they battled for a postseason spot.
There were a few funny things about how his Braves tenure proceeded. For one, said 95 wRC+ was the result of him outhitting his xwOBA by about .010. In other words, his xwOBA actually fell as a Brave relative to what he posted as a Tiger, but the results were much better.
Defensively, though, things were absolutely bonkers. Urshela posted +4 OAA-based runs with the Braves, after posting a -1 mark with the Tigers. Why is that crazy? Because in his entire career, Urshela had never, ever, posted a positive OAA at third base. In fact, he’d never even been average in any season where he played more than 350 innings at the hot corner, and there he was, +4 OAA-ing in just 321 defensive innings as a Brave. Defensive metrics are pretty volatile, but wow.
Urshela finished with 0.8 fWAR as a Brave in just 136 PAs. That’s a 3.5/600 pace, and while it was driven entirely by defense and the product of him outhitting his xwOBA by a fair bit, it was a huge boost for an injury-ravaged team.
What went right
Urshela’s best stretch with Atlanta came in the final two weeks of the regular season, where he hit an impressive .304/.328/.554 (141 wRC+) to give the lineup a real boost. He homered in back-to-back games in Miami on September 21-22 and enjoyed a strong series in Cincinnati prior to that. That September 22 game was one where he came up huge, going 3-for-4 with a homer in what was eventually a one-run win.
And as mentioned above, while three dozen games is hardly a sample size worth evaluating in the eyes of the defensive metrics, Urshela was scintillating at third base and really helped solidify the infield defensively, in a way that was completely contrary to the rest of his career.
What went wrong
The theme of this piece has largely been ‘Gio Urshela was totally fine given the circumstances,’ so it’s tough to nitpick a ton. One thing that was kind of darkly funny amid his xwOBA overperformance, though, was that Urshela talked at length about how he changed his approach with the Braves and how it was paying dividends, but… was it?
Urshela definitely did change his approach. Always a swing-happy guy, he pretty much went into super-swing mode with the Braves. And, you’d think that now that he was swinging more often, he’d also adopt the other stuff the Braves do, like swinging hard and making harder contact, but… he didn’t. He somehow had the weird confluence of having his z-contact go up, his o-contact go way down, with no meaningful change to his piddly contact quality in the process. It was almost like he was slapping at the stuff in the zone while taking huge hacks at the stuff he was chasing at, which doesn’t really make any sense, but there you go. His bat speed barely budged from one of the lowest marks in baseball after he came to the Braves, which is a weird fact for a guy who actively talked postgame about how he was rediscovering his identity at the plate by trying to hit the ball harder.
As a Brave, Urshela’s lowest WPA game was the crazy penultimate one against the Mets. He had a single, two strikeouts, and tapped back to the pitcher before the Braves were able to rally for four runs in the eighth (before ultimately losing anyway). He also went 0-for-6 with two strikeouts in the Wild Card Series against San Diego although you can count on two fingers the number of Braves who did anything that week.
2025 outlook
Urshela is a free agent and will likely need to seek employment outside of Georgia, unless he wants to be a rarely-used backup while trying to actually learn how to hit the ball hard like his teammates. He might be able to catch on with a team looking for a cheaper starting solution at third base, although that team will need to hope he’s far more of the Atlanta version of himself and not the one in Detroit. If he has suddenly become a defensive savant heading into his age-33 season, well, that’ll make some team really happen, but the odds are against it.
That said, it’s not like Urshela’s totally done, he’s just not really a quality starter. He’s still projected to be somewhere in the 1-1.5 WAR range, which is a starter on a bad team, or a really good backup for a team that wants to carry one. His approach at the plate is too slappy to fit with what most teams want these days, but if he actually wants to change things around, rather than what happened to him offensively with the Braves, maybe he can push his production up a bit and stick around as a starter a bit longer.