After the initial \u201chow?\u201d and \u201cwhy?\u201d queries in response to Ha-Seong Kim slated to miss the first few weeks of the season with a hand injury sustained from slipping on ice, the next question is, \u201cOkay, so who\u2019s going to replace him on the roster?\u201d The Braves took at least a tentative step towards answering that question with the following:<\/p>\n
The 30-year-old Jorge Mateo is not exactly a notable MLB player, but there weren\u2019t too many of those available in free agency, anyway. His career, in particular, has been kind of silly: he had a 2.8 fWAR season on the back of an insanely good defensive year in 2022\u2026 and basically little else to talk about. That season aside, he hasn\u2019t really played good defense, and he\u2019s essentially never hit, with a career .274 wOBA and xwOBA (75 wRC+) that he sticks pretty close to. Seriously, his career-high wRC+ is 87 (when he outhit his xwOBA in 2024), and his career-low in any season with 200+ PAs is 66 (in 2023).<\/p>\n
Mateo lost a lot of playing time to injuries over the past two seasons. His 2024 season ended with Tommy John Surgery after an elbow subluxation (sustained in an infield collision); in 2025, he missed time with inflammation in that elbow, as well as a hamstring injury. The Orioles held a club option on him for 2026 for $5.5 million, but turned it down. That makes sense, given that he\u2019s been worth less than 1 fWAR in 641 PAs over his last three seasons.<\/p>\n
While the Braves might be thinking of Mateo as more of a warm body they scrambled to add in the wake of Kim\u2019s injury status, the real question about whether he offers anything going forward is really about whatever happened with him defensively in 2022 versus at any other point. A guy who can\u2019t hit particularly well (but better than Nick Allen!) but can play stellar shortstop defense is valuable. A guy who can\u2019t hit or play defense well is replacement level and is basically what you expect to get when your starting shortstop goes down for the count late in the offseason thanks to an icy encounter.<\/p>\n
Steamer has Mateo as something akin to a 1 WAR\/600 guy, basically an okay-quality benchwarmer. That\u2019s basically where ZiPS has him to. Essentially, both of those systems figure that he can still provide some defensive value, even if he\u2019s not going to hit. If that\u2019s the case, then that\u2019ll work out a lot better for the Braves than a pure 0 WAR guy, but we\u2019ll see. It\u2019s not like it would be surprising, since he\u2019s basically accrued 1 WAR in his last 600 PAs as it is. Perhaps slightly more concerning is that he hit terribly (.202 xwOBA, 33 wRC+) in 83 PAs last year, but it was 83 PAs and he was returning from a quick rehab of Tommy John Surgery, so whatever.<\/p>\n
On the plus side, Mateo is very fast, and his raw exit velocities suggest that there might be power to unlock \u2014 if the Braves are still interested in that sort of thing. However, given that he\u2019s a free swinger with contact issues already, there\u2019s very little chance that any increased power output would come without plate discipline that progresses towards the horrific, so don\u2019t expect any revelations or improvements offensively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After the initial \u201chow?\u201d and \u201cwhy?\u201d queries in response to Ha-Seong Kim slated to miss the first few…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":532398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2394],"tags":[191,46,7951,4166,5,192,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-532397","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-atlanta-braves","8":"tag-atlanta","9":"tag-atlanta-braves","10":"tag-atlanta-braves-roster","11":"tag-atlantabraves","12":"tag-baseball","13":"tag-braves","14":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/115938070538125219","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=532397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/532398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=532397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=532397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=532397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}