Did the Braves wiggle out of their comfort zone? Does it matter?
I considered titling this post, “So Profar, So Good,” but, that seemed to make little sense at this juncture, and that was a headline-in-the-sand I’m not willing to cross at this point. Did the Atlanta Braves do well by signing Jurickson Profar to a three-year, $42 million deal? I can’t say I’m a huge fan. But, that part isn’t really important. What is important is that I can think of a bunch of interesting things that the deal calls to mind, so let’s just go there in lieu of normative judgments. Onwards!
A (moderately) Brave(s) new world, as far as free agency goes
If we set relievers aside, given the current Front Office’s completely aberrant attitude towards them in free agency relative to starters and hitters, do you wanna guess how many free agents the Braves had signed to multi-year deals before Profar? Think for yourself, and then read on…
…Four.
- Travis d’Arnaud, $16 million for two years;
- Marcell Ozuna, $65 million for four years;
- Manny Pina, $8 million for two years; and
- Eddie Rosario, $18 million for two years.
The Manny Pina deal is almost to small to register, and he appeared in just five games as a Brave. The d’Arnaud and Rosario deals were both “cheap” in the sense that neither was getting paid like a starter on a good team, but also somewhat inefficient in the sense that they weren’t “player desperate to latch on takes what they can get” deals. Ozuna seems like the c-c-c-combo breaker here, but really, he isn’t. Coming off a monster shortened season, his market never materialized, and he ended up signing a substantially below-market deal given his forward-looking projections at the time. Bottom line: this Front Office is not about paying starter-quality free agents to hang around after they’ve declined below that quality; the team signed more (non-reliever!) free agents to expensive or expensive-ish one-year deals (Josh Donaldson, Ozuna, Cole Hamels, Charlie Morton, Drew Smyly) than it did to multi-year deals of any kind.
But, this isn’t a free agency thing, only, as of course, this team’s dollars are tied up in extensions.
- Matt Olson was extended ahead of his age-28 season, through age 35. He was projected for 5.0 WAR by ZiPS going into that season, and applying the most basic aging curve possible has the deal ending before he slides under the 2.0 WAR threshold in what would be his age-36 season.
- Austin Riley was extended in his age-25 season, covering his age-26 through age-35 seasons. He was projected for 4.8 WAR by ZiPS going into that season; applying that same basic aging curve again has the deal ending immediately before the 2.0 WAR threshold is tripped.
- Sean Murphy’s extension covers his age-28 through age-33 seasons, and while this is basically comical at this point, using Murphy’s ZiPS projection for the upcoming season following his extension and applying a generic aging curve has the deal end right before he dips under 2.0 WAR.
- Ronald Acuña Jr. won’t even be 30 when the guaranteed part of his deal ends. The game goes for Michael Harris II, and Ozzie Albies, and Spencer Strider.
You get the idea. I’m not directly suggesting the Braves are using ZiPS, or generic aging curves that offer no player-specific insight, but if they were, their behavior in terms of both free agency and extensions suggests that there’s a conceptual line they’re not interested in crossing, and that line has to do with being locked into paying a guy for below-average production (unless that guy happens to be Eddie Rosario, for whatever reason, and even then, it wasn’t starter-type money anyway).
So, then, Jurickson Profar. We’ll get more into the specifics in a bit, but without them, Profar is entering his age-32 season and projected to be… average. That suggests the same generic aging curve is going to put him squarely into below average territory in the second and third year of his deal, meaning that the Braves have crossed a line they haven’t really crossed before (unless you want to be an Eddie Rosario contract hardliner, I guess).
To put it another way, let’s say this wasn’t a deal for Profar, but for a nameless position player in his early 30s who was projected for around 2 WAR next year. That’s exactly the type of guy the Braves would’ve probably given around $20 million on a one-year deal at some point to tide them over — exactly like Cole Hamels, whom ZiPS pegged for 2.2 WAR as a point estimate ahead of the 2020 season, and who got $18 million to barely lift a finger.
So, do I like this deal? Well, I would’ve liked it infinitely better as a $20ish million, one year deal. But even this Front Office, which has evinced a striking degree of ideological purity to date, has budged…
…or maybe they haven’t. Maybe it all depends on how one thinks about Profar the player, rather than Profar the stand-in for a 32-year-old projected for league-average production next year.
Jurickson Profar, in real life
One thing’s for sure: Profar is not a prototypical 31-year-old free agent with middling projections for the upcoming season. He made his debut at 19, played a half season very poorly at 20, returned to the majors at 23 and was still underwhelming, was even worse in a limited sample at 24, and finally turned in an average season (thanks to xwOBA overperformance) at 25… only to be smacked down into a below-average season at 26 when he underhit his xwOBA instead. A nice 2020 (career-best wOBA and xwOBA) was ruined by the fact that it was a short season, and then Profar slid back to a below-replacement 2021, set a career high with 2.4 fWAR in 2022, and then was literally the worst player in baseball (-1.6 fWAR, somehow) in 2023.
Even before his 2023 season, Profar’s career had consisted of 6.4 fWAR in about 3,100 PAs, an underwhelming 1.2 fWAR-per-600 PAs rate. Including that season turned it nasty, to 0.8/600. If you had told someone a year ago that Profar was going to go from worst-in-MLB to playing so well in 2024 to get a multiyear deal from the Braves, of all teams, well, I’m not sure they’d have believed you back then. But he did!
By this point, you’re probably aware of all the digital ink on Profar’s turnaround. He worked with Fernando Tatis Sr. to rework his swing, and his 4.3 fWAR in 2024 was not the result of anything resembling xwOBA overperformance, but rather just a substantial improvement in his capacity at the plate. What this looks like, though, is pretty interesting.
If you look at Savant’s percentile rankings (which, side note, are overly aggressive; league-average xwOBA was .312 last year, but Jo Adell’s player page shows him as in the 45th percentile of xwOBA, not the 50th — this is because the percentiles are based on a subset of “closer to full-time” players and not on the league as a whole, the same way the median wRC+ for guys qualified for the batting title is higher than 100), the previous Profar pattern (sorry) was pretty clear:
- From 2018-2020, he slapped at the ball, including on pitches out of the zone, leading to a mediocre batting line built on avoiding strikeouts and a decent amount of walks.
- From 2021-2023, he tweaked his approach to chase less, but whatever this tweak was, it made his contact profile even slappier; the tradeoff wasn’t really a good one, as the power outage was not compensated for sufficiently by extra walks.
That brings us to 2024, and while you know what happened, it’s worth noting that while Profar chased even less than he had before, bumping up his already-great walk rate further (his already-great strikeout rate didn’t change much). But, whereas he had previously chased less and made even piddlier contact than before, his 2024 involved hitting the ball with authority for pretty much the first time ever. The result was one of the best batting lines in the game. The relationship between walk/strikeout rates and quality of contact is a complicated one (forcing me to rewrite this paragraph…); while greater strikeout rates are generally associated with more oomph, the reality is that more patience also leads to more oomph; meanwhile, low strikeout rates can result in either lots of mishits or just lots of whiffs.
There have been 96 players to have at least eight seasons of 200 or more PAs in the Statcast era. Here’s the breakdown of these 96 based on how many seasons (out of eight-plus) they’ve posted an above-average xwOBACON:
You’ve got about a tenth of the long-tenured player base that’s never done it, and about a quarter that’s always done it. Due to ye olde regression to the mean, the middle pseudo-quintile is otherwise the most populated. Profar, of course, with his 1-for-8, falls into the second column from the left; the other guys to have one above-average xwOBACON season amid about a decade of not that are Alex Bregman, Cesar Hernandez, Kevin Kiermaier, Martin Maldonado, and Jean Segura. Bregman’s outlier season came as a rookie; he then shifted to a more reined-in profile that’s usually (but not always) worked better for him. Segura’s came in 2016 he had a similar shift to focus on contact after but never posted anything close offensively to what he did that year when he was actually trying to hit the ball hard. Hernandez did so in 2020 in what looks like a true outlier two-month span; Kiermaier’s came in 2022 in a part-time season. Maldonado’s came with a ballooning strikeout rate.
I don’t have much of a point here, other than to say that what Profar did in 2024 bristles against some rudimentary paradigms of how we think about batters. His compatriots in the “one season with an above-average xwOBACON” club got their single-season gains in a pretty straightforward way where they chased more and/or made less contact; Profar chased less and made more contact and somehow struck the ball way harder than ever before. There have only been 15 player-seasons in the Statcast era with a strikeout rate equal to or lower than Profar’s 2024 rate, a walk rate equal to or higher than Profar’s 2024 rate, and an xwOBACON equal to or higher than Profar’s 2024 mark, and of those 15, ten are repeat performances by Juan Soto, Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, Anthony Rizzo, and Anthony Rendon. If you instead do it by chase rate, walk rate, and xwOBACON, the pool becomes an even smaller 13 player-seasons, with 11 of those seasons achieved by Joe Mauer, Justin Turner, Betts, and Rendon.
How he did it
Two Decembers ago, Tom Tango published on his blog a thing that I am continually surprised doesn’t get more play everywhere: predictive wOBA. The short version is that as Tango has repeated multiple times, xwOBA was not designed to be predictive (though it’s still more predictive of say, next-year wOBA than wOBA itself), but if one wanted to use contact quality to forecast future wOBA, you’d want to incorporate a framework like this:
There’s nothing that surprising here — hitting it hard in the air is the best, if you’re not going to do that then hitting it harder is still better than hitting it less hard, hitting it at a line drive-ish angle is better than not, grounders are lame unless you hit them super-hard, and you definitely don’t want to hit a can of corn at all ever.
While I’ll leave the discussion of predictive wOBA, as it is, for another time (mostly because, due to my substantial disappointment, I didn’t find it had great utility over xwOBA itself for various reasons, which I guess explains why xwOBA continues to get a lot of play and predictive wOBA is just kind of a curiosity), the framework above gives us some pretty cool insight into the evolution of Profar’s batted ball profile. I’ll save you the trouble of looking at a giant grid over multiple periods; I summed the different shades in Tango’s table and gave them obvious monikers:
Part of what’s kind of shocking about having things arrayed this way is that it shows you just how much baseball is a game of failure. Only about a fifth of contact is particularly good; over half of contact is really bad. From 2018-2020, Profar was far worse than the league, with substantially less exciting contact and more bad contact. When he shifted his approach from 2021-2023 towards less chasing, the contact profile just looked grim. And then, in 2024, his big achievement was… having a league-average contact profile? It feels kind of underwhelming, but it is what it is: Profar’s huge breakthrough was hitting the ball hard enough to look like a league-average bat, while also A) walking a lot more than average; and B) striking out less than average, such that he was able to reap the benefits of an average-y contact profile in more of his plate appearance than an average batter.
In other words, I don’t think we really need to buy into the idea that his xwOBACON was particularly good. It was fine. And that’s okay, because if we think that all he was doing was fixing a prior weakness (piddly contact) and letting his superior plate discipline carry his batting line to the promised land, it doesn’t feel like he did something so incredible in 2024 that it can’t be replicated. At the same time, said plate discipline has been roughly consistent for much of his career, so that probably won’t go sideways in and of itself. For a guy with such an hodgepodge, uninspiring career, this was maybe the least hodgepodge-y way to have a breakout offensive season. “He did the same stuff he was doing in terms of swing decisions and hit the ball just hard enough to look average-y on contact. Yay.” Not exactly groundbreaking stuff, here.
The upside
The upside should be obvious, because for the same reasons that Profar’s changes in 2024 don’t fit any basic paradigm of how hitters trade success in one area for additional struggles in another, they also don’t fit any paradigm of “well, duh, he’s gonna regress.” I mean, most guys putting up 4+ WAR seasons regress, that’s just the basic idea of regression to the mean. But Profar seemingly made a no-tradeoff improvement to have his 2024, so it’s not clear what, if anything, is going to sneak up on him. Sure, he could go back to swinging more softly, but after the oomph got him a deal that essentially doubled his career earnings in one fell swoop, after his age-31 season, why would he?
If he is able to do the whole 2024 shebang again, that is, basically no chases, no whiffs, very few strikeouts, very many walks, and above-average contact quality, the Braves will make out like bandits here. Even if you fiddle with the margins a bit, that’s still basically a 4 WAR player; the lowest fWAR total for a “qualified” player with a .360 wOBA or higher last year was 3.4.
The risks
The flip side, though, is that while going all-in(ish) on “weird stuff” can pay dividends, sometimes you just end up with something weird and not particularly good. Profar’s improvements were unexpected enough that it’s hard to argue they’re unsustainable, but this is still a guy whose track record is terrifying. Hence, the preference for a one-year deal where, if it turns out that he simply ate some kind of oomph-bestowing cheese in Tatis Sr.’s presence and no longer has access to that cheese and reverts to bench player quality, you’re not on the hook for additional years and dollars.
There’s some other stuff, too. Profar’s defense has been consistently poor, and he plays an “easy” defensive position. If he doesn’t hit, he’s pretty much useless, and he’s a single year removed from being so bad in the field that his teams would’ve probably benefited from sticking him at DH (except he didn’t hit either, so…). His defense also isn’t bad in a particularly rectifiable way, as he seems to have kind of a royal flush of issues: poor lateral movement, bad at coming in on the ball, poor first steps, poor routes, problematic arm accuracy that diminishes the benefits of his arm strength, and a propensity to mess up 50-50ish plays while also lacking the physical ability to get to the tough ones. Again, if he hits the way he did in 2024, no one will care all that much. If he somehow can only carry over a chunk of his gains in hitting the ball well, and not the whole kit and caboodle, the caring will increase quite a bit.
I also wonder about how the Braves will approach Profar with regard to coaching. The obvious suggestion seems to be, from a big picture perspective, to just leave him alone. Pre-2024 Profar looked like a solid candidate for what we jocularly refer to as “The PowerPoint,” that is, the idea that the Braves want their bats to trade contact for power, especially z-contact on pitches that won’t fly out of the yard for whiffs and a chance to take another pitch and therefore another potential hack that could result in something better. But post-2024 Profar, well, doesn’t look like the sort of guy that’s worth tinkering with. Of course, there are also bigger picture questions here: will the Braves even stick with the PowerPoint now that 2024 and its drag-laden baseballs is in the books, and now that Tim Hyers has replaced Kevin Seitzer? Maybe signing Profar is another way the Braves are going out of their previous comfort zone, signaling a change to a different offensive approach altogether. I wouldn’t bet on it, but if that were already decided to be the case, then you could see things fitting together a bit more.
The Padres, overall, were a strikeout-allergic team last year, part of a deliberate offensive approach that, without any hint of irony, actively tried to put the ball in play. Profar also didn’t perfectly fit into this approach, either — he walked a lot while his teammates, as a unit, also had a piddly barrel rate and league-average damage on contact overall. Still, the Padres managed to turn those things into the league’s third-best xwOBA (and fifth-best wOBA). Again, it makes you (or maybe just me) wonder about what we’ll be seeing as an offensive approach going forward, especially now that Profar is in the fold. He could be a harbinger of things to come, or just a black sheep.
The conclusion
The section header lied, I don’t really have one. The pull of “Man, I wish the Braves had signed Profar for $20M/1” is strong. On the one hand, his 2024 doesn’t seem particularly risky. On the other hand, betting against a broad baseball universe that suggests, based on a wealth of history, that a soon-to-be 32-year-old with widely divergent performance in his last two years is probably going to be just okay next year and disappointingly less than that afterwards, seems risky. Either way, the Braves have made their choice.
That said, Leo Morgenstern at FanGraphs summarized the deal today, and something in his article made me chuckle:
Three years and $42 million is the same contract both Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and Jorge Soler signed last offseason, and very close to the three-year, $43.5 million deal Mitch Haniger signed the winter before. In other words, it’s the going rate for a corner outfielder in his early 30s with something like a two-win projection but All-Star upside.
To be clear, Gurriel’s three years before his deal included fWARs of 1.8, 1.6, and 1.9, each with wOBAs in the .330ish range and xwOBAs in the .320-.340 range. Soler got his deal coming off a 1.8 fWAR season, but was markedly worse (due to xwOBA underperformance) the prior two years, World Series heroics and all. Gurriel had a 2 fWAR season as the first year of his deal; Soler finished at 1.1. Haniger, well, the less said the better — he got his deal off a 1.0 fWAR season and has been below replacement (thanks to xwOBA underperformance, but the xwOBAs haven’t been good, either) since. Each of these guys seems more like a cautionary tale for the Braves, but I don’t think they’re that comparable, either.
In any case, the Braves are now back behind just the Dodgers for the roster with the best projected production in 2025, thanks to the Profar addition. As to how things play out, well, that’s why we’ll be watching come spring.