One weekend into the 2025 regular season, baseball is already throwing up some pretty big surprises. Here’s one: The Atlanta Braves have the worst record in baseball. The Braves! The perennial best non-Dodger team in the National League, with their Toyota pickup-level dependable lineup and fountain of talented young arms, went 0-4 against the Padres.
Then, on Monday afternoon, more bad news dropped: Jurickson Profar has been suspended 80 games for violating MLB’s policy on performance enhancing drugs. Minutes after Profar’s suspension came out, Reynaldo López was placed on the IL with right shoulder inflammation. All this comes amidst Brian Snitker, the club’s beloved and highly successful manager, hinting that he might hang up his lineup card at the end of the year. And to top off this day of crap, Grant Holmes got knocked around in the series opener against the Dodgers and Atlanta dropped to 0-5.
Fortunately, MLB Shop is already selling jerseys to commemorate the occasion:
As a general principle, I scoff at the idea that a bad weekend can be characterized as a crisis at any point before Labor Day. In case you disagree, consider that the team that ended the weekend atop the NL East was not the Phillies or Mets but the Marlins. Here’s a good rule of thumb: If the Marlins are in first place, it’s too early to panic. Even after the beatings continued against Dodgers, morale should not be bottoming out this early.
Nevertheless, this is not an ideal way to kick off the season. A 3 1/2-game deficit to the Phillies, and an even three games in the Wild Card placings, is a hole that’ll need to be climbed out of. And the Braves will have to do it without their starting left fielder and an important mid-rotation starter. On days like this, retirement would start to look good for any manager.
Let’s deal with those three issues one at a time: Profar’s suspension, then López’s injury, then the goose-egg in San Diego.
The Braves bought relatively high on Profar this winter, signing the former top global prospect, who turned 32 in February, to a three-year, $42 million contract. Profar recovered from an injury-riddled early career to develop into a serviceable utilityman, and then a contact-over-power corner outfielder. After playing a key role for a Padres team that went to the NLCS in 2022, Profar was nearly two full wins below replacement level in 2023, mostly for the Rockies, before he returned to San Diego.
In 2024, Profar had the best season of his career by a huge margin: a .280/.380/.459 line, with a wRC+ of 139. Profar’s 24 home runs were a career high. Only once before, outside of the peak of the juiced-ball era, had Profar even reached double digits. In a fairly weak free agent class for outfielders, Profar was our no. 22 free agent.
Knowing what we know now, Ben Clemens’ writeup on Profar is hilarious to read. “[Profar’s 2024] season came out of nowhere… Trying to figure out what Profar will do next feels more or less impossible.” Which is absolutely true — I had no idea that four games into his new contract, he was going to get popped for a banned substance with “gonad” in the name.
I don’t know if anyone expected Profar to repeat his .380 OBP and mid-20s home run power, but he seemed like a safe bet to fill a position that’s been slightly cursed for the Braves of late. In 2021, Atlanta rode the best two and a half months of Eddie Rosario’s career to a World Series title, and ever since then, they’ve mixed and matched and finagled and never quite been satisfied.
With Profar out until midseason, GM Alex Anthopoulos will have to reach back into the piñata of random corner outfield guys and hope he pulls out a winner. And with Ronald Acuña Jr. still several weeks from game fitness, he’s now nursing voids in both outfield corners.
Perhaps you think using the word “voids” is laying it on a little thick. To that I say: The next man up is Alex Verdugo, who hit .233/.291/.356 with the Yankees last year, hasn’t posted a 2.0 WAR season (or its prorated equivalent) since 2020, and was reportedly left without a major league offer until the Braves signed him on March 20. Because Verdugo signed so late, he’s still making up for lost training camp time. The ramp-up process is less delicate for hitters than it is for pitchers, but Verdugo didn’t get into a single Grapefruit League game, and he’s yet to appear in a game for Triple-A Gwinnett.
Because we’re talking about Verdugo, it’s a good time to mention the following: Not only was Profar Atlanta’s biggest free agent signing of the offseason, he was the only free agent the Braves signed to a major league contract until Verdugo came along. This is a big loss not only in terms of actual production, but in terms of opportunity cost as well.
That’s all the more true because while the Braves will get Profar back at the end of June, he’s now ineligible to play in the postseason, courtesy of the Melky Cabrera Rule. So whatever interim solution Anthopoulos finds had better work, because he could end up needing it again in October.
López danced between the raindrops to some extent in his first start of the season. He allowed nine hits and two walks in five innings against the Padres in his start on Friday, striking out only one. But he stranded seven runners on base, and benefited from an inning-ending out on the bases in the first, to limit the damage to three runs.
López is in his second season back in the rotation, and while he was terrific in 2024 — a 1.99 ERA in 135 2/3 innings, good enough for selection to the All-Star team — it wasn’t all smooth sailing. The 31-year-old took two trips to the IL in the second half to shake off inflammation in his forearm and shoulder, and his velocity was up and down this spring.
This is López’s fifth IL stint since 2020, but the previous four have all been brief: one for 26 days, the other three for more or less the minimum 15 days. If this is another take-two-Tylenol-and-drink-plenty-of-fluids situation, it’s basically a non-event this early in the season. But the shoulder is a scary joint for pitchers, so the situation bears monitoring.
I wrote about Atlanta’s rotation in early March. It’s an interesting unit, with as high a ceiling as any staff in baseball but non-trivial concerns about consistency and durability. López’s two late-season IL stints last year gave me pause, and his going back on the shelf after one start does little to put those concerns to rest.
With that said, the Braves still have Chris Sale, Spencer Schwellenbach, and a wealth of high-minors depth. Already, AJ Smith-Shawver’s been called from that pool to take up a big league rotation spot, and Bryce Elder is coming up from Gwinnett (or over from Gwinnett, I should say, as the Stripers play about 35 miles east-by-northeast from Truist Park) to fill in for López.
And it bears repeating that Spencer Strider is coming back. Here, I’ll say it again: Spencer Strider is coming back. That’ll paper over a lot of cracks.
Still, the Braves are out two key contributors just five games into the season, and in case you forgot, they lost all five of those games.
Against San Diego, Atlanta’s starters weren’t spectacular, with the exception of Schwellenbach, who held the Padres to one hit and one walk over six scoreless innings on Saturday. But every Braves starter pitched well enough to win. All four got through the rotation at least twice, and none of them allowed more than three runs to score in the process. More to the point: Atlanta was either tied or leading at the seventh-inning stretch in three of the four losses.
Which points a big, honking red arrow of culpability at the Atlanta bullpen. Sure enough, Braves’ relievers allowed nine runs in 12 innings in that opening series, and came out of the weekend near the bottom of the league rankings in ERA and WPA.
In this respect, I have some good news: The Braves have identified a large part of the problem.
On March 3, Atlanta signed veteran sinkerballer Héctor Neris and invited him to camp, and the 35-year-old workhorse played his way onto the roster. It took him two appearances to play his way off. Neris entered a tie game on Opening Day and allowed three straight hits, including the eventual game-winning home run, without recording an out. He completed an inning on Sunday, but allowed two more runs in the process. To that point, he was responsible for more than half of the earned runs and nearly two-thirds of the negative WPA Atlanta’s bullpen had surrendered to date.
The Braves DFA’d Neris on Monday morning, which in retrospect feels like a background event at the beginning of a disaster movie. Tommy Lee Jones isn’t supposed to be at the O.E.M. office in the first act of Volcano — he’s on vacation — but seven utility workers burned to death underground at MacArthur Park, so he might as well check that out.
The real problem is that the Braves got shut out twice in a row to end the series. By the time Michael Harris II homered off Tanner Scott to break the dry spell, it had stretched to 30 innings in length. The weird guy down the hall in your freshman dorm who plays the ukulele and hasn’t washed his towel in three months is like, “Damn, even I score more often than that.”
Yikes, Bruh
Name PA BB SO HR R RBI AVG OBP SLG wOBA wRC+ Marcell Ozuna 20 8 7 0 1 2 .167 .500 .167 .366 131 Matt Olson 20 6 3 0 0 0 .143 .400 .214 .315 97 Ozzie Albies 20 2 2 1 1 3 .167 .250 .333 .260 60 Austin Riley 20 2 7 1 2 1 .111 .200 .333 .234 42 Michael Harris II 19 0 7 1 1 1 .158 .158 .316 .200 20 Jarred Kelenic 17 0 6 1 1 1 .176 .176 .353 .224 36 Jurickson Profar 16 1 3 0 2 0 .200 .250 .200 .209 26 Drake Baldwin 16 1 4 0 0 0 .067 .125 .067 .099 -48 Orlando Arcia 13 0 5 0 0 0 .154 .154 .154 .136 -23 Bryan De La Cruz 5 0 3 0 0 0 .000 .000 .000 .000 -100
It’s not great. And it would look a lot worse if Ozuna and Olson hadn’t combined to walk…14 times in five games? That’s a lot. Good for them.
There are legitimate reasons for pessimism regarding Atlanta’s lineup on the whole: Age and workload concerns for Ozuna and Olson. Albies’ continued insistence on taking two-thirds of his at-bats from the left side of the plate, where he’s 200-plus points of OPS worse than he is from the right side. Arcia might not be that good anymore, full stop. Baldwin is a monster prospect, but any rookie catcher might need time to get up to speed against big league competition.
But the Padres have a good rotation, and good high-leverage relievers, and they play in a pitchers’ park. That surely had something to do with Atlanta’s troubling offensive outage. Consider this as well: Over opening weekend, the Braves’ offense had the second-lowest BABIP and second-highest strand rate in the league. In other words: Expect things to look up. Especially when Acuña and Sean Murphy come back.
In short, only a fool would write off one of the best teams in the National League based on one bad weekend. But it’d be equally foolish to ignore how bad this weekend was, both on and off the diamond. There’s plenty of time to dig out, but the Braves are definitely in a hole.
