Jorge Soler had an excellent season with the bat for the Braves. However, his defense was pretty much the opposite.
Jorge Soler will always be an Atlanta Braves legend after his mammoth moonshot in the final game of the 2021 World Series. That famous home run, flying 446 feet off his bat, solidified him as the rightful World Series MVP. The Braves didn’t re-sign him, and he spent the next two-and-a-half seasons in Miami and then San Francisco, before the Braves tried a bit of bringing-the-band-back-together magic and acquired him at the Trade Deadline.
How acquired
In 2021, the Braves had a outfield plagued by injuries, so they acquired Jorge Soler from the Royals at the Trade Deadline. It worked out amazingly, as he posted 1.1 fWAR in 242 PAs (133 wRC+) and did even better in the playoffs (145 wRC+, some huge homers).
In 2024, the Braves had an outfield plagued by injuries, so they acquired Jorge Soler from the Giants at the Trade Deadline. They also acquired old pal Luke Jackson, in exchange for an injured Tyler Matzek and Sabin Ceballos. Soler was not a rental, as he had inked a $36 million, three-year deal with the Giants in the offseason; the Braves took on $13 million salaries in both 2025 and 2026, as well as a portion of the $7 million Soler was owed in 2024 as part of the deal.
What were the expectations?
At a high level, you could say the Braves were hoping for a repeat of 2021 in many respects, but not that they necessarily expected it. In 2021, Soler had a .348 xwOBA but a .289 wOBA prior to his acquisition; he caught fire with a wOBA and xwOBA both right around .375 after the trade. In 2024, Soler had a .339 xwOBA and a .328 wOBA before the trade. In 2021, he split time between the outfield and DH about half the time before the trade; in 2024, he was a full-time DH prior to the trade. The Braves’ outfield was in such bad shape in both instances that they probably didn’t mind Soler’s defensive deficiencies so long as he could hit. All in all, Soler had 0.6 fWAR in 392 PAs with the Giants before being shipped off, though that was the result of the aforementioned xwOBA underperformance. Basically, the Braves could expect a good-to-great bat and to avert their eyes at his defensive shenanigans.
And that’s pretty much what happened.
2024 Results
Though he was acquired in part to compensate for the pervasive injury bug afflicting the team, he proved to be just as susceptible to it as his new teammates. Not long after coming to Atlanta, he went down with a hamstring injury that stopped him from regularly appearing for a few days.
The rest was, well, pretty much as expected. Soler’s 135 wRC+ was very close to the 133 mark he put up after being acquired in 2021. He then went on to have a 193 wRC+ in a grand total of eight PAs in the postseason. Mission accomplished, sorta — Soler did his part, anyway. The flip side, though, was maybe some of the worst defense you could’ve seen in 2024, such that Soler finished with 0.4 fWAR in 182 PAs. For comparison, Soler had 1.1 fWAR in 242 PAs post-trade in 2021. The former is a 1.3/600 pace; the latter a 2.7/600 pace. Basically, Soler’s defense was responsible for having his WAR accumulation rate relative to his 2021 performance, despite a similar batting line. But, hey, .243/.356/.493 with nine homers is what they wanted, and what they got.
For the season, Soler finished with a 119 wRC+ and 1.1 fWAR in 574 PAs, which is pretty meh.
What went right?
Soler improved across the board after the trade, with his wOBA and xwOBA jumping into the .360s, thanks to a hike in his walk rate, an across-the-board improvement in his contact quality, and a much more patient approach than anything he’d shown in years. He even did what he could to try and keep the Braves in the game in the payoffs, albeit to no avail, hitting a bomb and reaching two other times in eight tries.
Soler had a wonderful time at Coors Field shortly after being acquired, homering in each game in the series (and four times in total) and reaching base five other times. His coup de grace was actually in the middle game of the series, not the game where he had two homers, but the one where he went 2-for-3 with a homer and a walk, with his late single and homer extending a slim lead each time.
And then, of course, there was his game-tying single that ultimately prompted a late comeback win — his first hit in his second stint as a Brave — that definitely spread “we are so back” vibes throughout Truist Park.
What went wrong?
Simply put, Soler’s defense was horrid. This wasn’t surprising — they were asking a guy who hadn’t even played the field this year to return to the field without missing a beat. But, it being expected didn’t make it sting any less. Soler finished with -7 OAA-based runs (six lost from range, one from his arm), in just 46 games and 326 innings. That’s an absurd rate of over 21 runs lost per 1,000 innings, which is unthinkable, and sure, he probably would’ve never gotten there but… oof.
It was so bad that even the component pieces look ridiculous. He whiffed half of the eight two-star plays hit to him; those plays are made over 75 percent of the time in general. He had 12 harder plays, and made none of them. He finished in the bottom ten in Statcast’s jump metric among pretty much anyone to play the outfield. And while not directly related to fielding, he had one of the worst baserunning seasons out there — it was a bottom-ten baserunning season in MLB, and there were only three guys markedly worse than him.
The defense was so bad that despite his batting line, Soler was basically producing like a bench guy overall. Sure, it was still an upgrade for a Braves team that was giving Jarred Kelenic and his 0.5 fWAR in 449 PAs a lot of rope, but it wasn’t great.
And Soler wasn’t immune from the stray bad game, either — no one is. On September 20, he went 0-for-3 with a sac fly in a one-run loss to the Marlins. His sac fly came with the bases loaded and one out, and he had a groundout to end the seventh with the tying and go-ahead runs on base.
2025 Outlook
There was a lot of discussion about how the Braves were going to handle things going forward, with Ronald Acuña Jr. set to return and Marcell Ozuna entrenched at the DH position. Sure, the Braves could have figured out some kind of arrangement that saw either the fielding-deficient Soler or the recovering Acuña forced to man the spacious left field at Truist Park on a regular basis, but they took a different route — basically as soon as the offseason opened, they shipped Soler off to Anaheim in exchange for non-tender candidate pitcher Griffin Canning.
The Angels get a guy with a good bat that can avoid playing the field, and the Braves don’t have to worry about a $26 million commitment to Soler over the next two seasons. Soler’s projections are likely to be in the 1.5 WAR-per-full-season range for 2025; Steamer has him at a 117 wRC+ (he’s a career 113 wRC+) hitter eating pretty much the full DH penalty value-wise. Given that he’s put up 3.2 fWAR over the last three years, in total, that makes sense.
Anaheim will be a reunion of sorts between Soler, Travis d’Arnaud, and Ron Washington, hopefully they have a good time. And should the Braves find themselves with another outfield conundrum come the Trade Deadline, they could always acquire Soler a third time…