I don’t want y’all to get the wrong idea with this type of post. For starters, it’s been a down year for nearly the entire offense. You can go down the lineup on any given day and you’ll be hard-pressed to find any player who has been performing at their usual level. It’s been a rough, rough season for everybody involved and I’m not trying to pick on or single out one player in particular.
It’s especially been rough for Jurickson Profar. The Atlanta Braves brought him into town as their crown jewel of the offseason at three years and $42 million. The “good news” about that is that you can lop off half of what he was supposed to make this season but that’s only because it only took a handful of games for it to be revealed that he had tested positive for using a performance-enhancing drug. The obvious hope back then was that he’d be able to return in time to help give the Braves a boost in their push for the Postseason (Oh, what a sweet summer child I was.). Instead, Profar has returned and has essentially joined in with the rest of the team in putting on a disasterclass here in 2025.
Heading into action on Wednesday, Profar has been hitting .237/.320/.397 with a wOBA of .316, an xwOBA of .293 and a wRC+ of 102 with four home runs. The “good news” is that his wRC+ isn’t that bad when you compare it to some season’s he had in the past. That’s where I would say that the tweaks he made to his swing during the offseason (the ones that didn’t include PED usage) are coming in handy. With that being said, a wRC+ of 102 isn’t exactly the type of production that you’d expect from a signing of his caliber. The question then becomes “What if this is his ceiling when it comes to hitting?” It could turn out that Profar’s destined to simply be an average hitter off of the juice, since I wouldn’t exactly hold out hope for him hitting the lofty heights of having an wRC+ in the 130s like he did during his “breakout” 2024 season.
Normally, that’d be okay-ish? Sure, it’s incredibly disappointing compared to what the expectations were but it’s at least manageable if you pair it with decent defense. That’s been the problem, though — Profar has never been a plus defender but the hope was that maybe he could be serviceable out there in order to at least bring something else to the table.
Now, to be fair to Profar, he’s made some solid catches with the Braves so far (he even made a fantastic sliding catch later on in the same game!) but those have been the exception far more than the rule. gain, it’s the type of bad defense that you’ll tolerate if you can make up for it by mashing but being a league average hitter with poor defense simply isn’t going to cut it. As a matter of fact, Ivan The Great kind of called something like this being a possibility when he gave his thoughts on the Profar signing back during the Winter. Here’s a refresher for you:
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.
Well folks, the caring has, in fact, increased quite a bit. The “good news” here (I hate that I’ve had to use scare quotes so many times in this article when it comes to accentuating bright side) is that this is only a three-year deal so it’s not like it’s a super-long commitment to make. If Profar’s defense becomes unplayable then at a certain point he could transition into a DH-only role. The problem with that is two-fold. The first problem is that we could very well be seeing the peak of Profar as a hitter while he’s here. Sure, he’s 32-years-old but at the same time, his career wRC+ and wOBA profile has looked like a rollercoaster that doesn’t look like a lot of fun to hop on.
While the pattern on the graph may suggest that a bounce-back is on the way, there’s still a real question of how much of his improvement at the plate was real and how much of a mirage did the PEDs provide. If there is a bounce-back, then sweet. I look forward to seeing him and the rest of the team return to form in 2026. If not, then the Braves might be dealing with an anchor in their lineup. It’s not something new to the Braves — remember Marcell Ozuna having those two nightmare seasons on-and-off the field in 2021 and 2022? It would still be annoying, nonetheless.
There’s also the issue of having a dedicated DH on your roster. Teams are starting to value having versatility when it comes to the DH spot. Now granted, there are still a decent amount of hitters who are expected to show up to swing the bat and that’s it but more and more, we’re starting to see teams utilize it more as giving a guy a day off from the field while keeping him in the lineup instead of continuing to utilize the DH as a specialist role. I mean, you can still get away with doing it if you’re elite like Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani (or even just above-average) but the talent pool of DH-only players is pretty thin. Heading into action on Wednesday night, only 15 DHs in baseball had a wRC+ above 110. If you’re going to be a DH-only, you have to rake. Otherwise, you’re not being nearly as efficient with that spot of the lineup as you could be.
Could Jurickson Profar be good enough to serve as a primary DH? Again, it’s possible but I wouldn’t rate it as probable! Again, we’ve already gone over how Profar has essentially been on a rollercoaster for years now and it genuinely wouldn’t be shocking at all if the rollercoaster was starting to roll back into the station and level off at this spot. If that’s the case, then I can’t imagine that the Braves would be thrilled about having a barely league-average hitter as their hitting specialist.
So yeah, the Braves might have a Jurickson Profar problem going forward. Now granted, you can’t exactly blame the organization for this one. Sometimes you just roll snake eyes and that appears to be the case for the Braves so far. There’s still a decent amount of time left in his contract for hm to potentially (and hopefully) turn this around. After all, we’re only talking about the first 150 plate appearances of his time with the Braves. It would be a bit harsh to completely write him off at this point. With all of that being said, this has certainly been an inauspicious start to Profar’s career in what’s been a disappointing season for not just him but the entire big league ballclub. We’ll see where this goes — hopefully we’ll see him do more of what he did last night and on this past Monday night as well.