<img alt="New York Mets v Atlanta Braves: Game One" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Udsdx93q_lc6ad949OfRUcmSOLY=/0x0:5283x3522/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73794722/2175036651.0.jpg">
Photo by Todd Kirkland/MLB Photos via Getty Images
The Braves’ diminutive second baseman is on a good year, down year pattern right now. In a lot of ways, Ozzie Albies’ 2024 season mirrored the entire team’s 2024 season. Injuries were a big part of his story, but lack of production while on the field also contributed to an overall frustrating and disappointing season. You could package that description up and hand it out to any number of Braves’ regulars in 2024, and certainly the team as a whole. In the end, Albies was okay and not much more than that, and gave fans some fun debate fodder when he returned batting exclusively right-handed to close out the season.
How acquired
With the departure of Max Fried this winter and the likely departure of A.J. Minter, as well as former mainstays like Freddie Freeman and Dansby Swanson leaving the last few years, Albies now finds himself as the longest-tenured Braves player, making his debut all the way back in 2017, Truist Park’s inaugural season. Originally signed as an international free agent way back in the Frank Wren era (2013), Albies has been in the organization more than a decade now, and still has multiple years of team control left on his current deal, which runs through 2025 but also has two club options for 2026 and 2027 (salaries at $7 million in each of those three years).
What were the expectations?
Albies’ career has been weird amid overall above-average performance. In even years, he’s posted an xwOBA around or below .300; in odd years, he’s posted an xwOBA around .330 or higher. He’s had two pretty blah, sub-2 WAR seasons, marred by both injury and subpar performance, in 2020 and 2022; he’s been a steady, non-injured, close-to-All-Star-level producer in odd years, nearing or exceeding 4 WAR each time from 2019-on.
2023 was one of those great production seasons, where Albies set a new career high with a 125 wRC+. Only his first negative defensive year (after positional adjustment, at that...) prevented him from setting a career high in fWAR (4.1 in 2023, 4.2 in 2019). He even tied his career high with a .326 xwOBA against right-handers, which may have temporarily quieted the “maybe Albies should bat right-handed full time” discussions.
Projection systems clearly don’t care about odd year magic (nor should they), so Albies was generally projected to be a 3ish win guy with above-average hitting and marginally below average defense at second base. Great in a vacuum, but even better when you consider the tremendous value he gives the Braves given his meager salary.
2024 Results
Like pretty much everything else on the position player side last season, things did not go according to plan for Albies in 2024... unless you want to start talking about how even years are apparently cursed for him. After missing half of the shortened 2020 season with a wrist contusion and then enduring an absurd 2022 season where he missed months with a foot fracture, only to return and fracture his pinky the day after being activated, Albies missed time in 2024 with a toe fracture (a couple of weeks early) and a wrist fracture (two months late). As a result, he appeared in just 99 games and got just 435 PAs.
Offensively, it was another slide of a season. His .306 xwOBA was right in line with his off years in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and he didn’t really outhit it. His 95 wRC+ barely avoided being a career low. His defense at second base wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as awful as it was in 2023, so that’s something. He finished with 1.3 fWAR in those 435 PAs, just below the 2 WAR-per-600 benchmark.
Coming off such an impressive 2023 season, 2024 was a steep fall back down the mountain, once again mirroring the team as a whole offensively.
What went right?
Albies’ predilection for contact has always given him near-elite strikeout rate numbers, with said rate usually living somewhere around 16-17 percent over a full season. He was even better at reducing strikeouts in 2024, positing a 14.9 percent strikeout rate, one of the very best in baseball. Of course, the irony of this is that the low strikeout rate is sometimes what can get him in trouble: he swings at everything, in the zone, out of the zone, doesn’t matter — he’s mastered the art of making contact on bad pitches to avoid high strikeout numbers. This tends to wreck his batted ball numbers and leads to a ton of weak contact that usually results in outs, and this was definitely true in 2024, as his career-low strikeout rate also came with a career-low xwOBACON. Wait, we’re supposed to be positive here.
Fortunately, Albies’ defense improved from its disastrous showing in 2023 (-10 OAA, -7 OAA-based runs). Albies’ 2024 mark of -1 OAA-based runs is much more respectable. He’s still miles away from the plus defender he was a few years ago but at least he wasn’t approaching worst second baseman in the league like he was in the year before.
This is also probably the place to talk about Albies’ return to the field, where he batted exclusively right-handed for his last nine games of the year. Nine games isn’t much of a sample, and, well...
From the left side in 2024, Albies had a .284 wOBA and .293 xwOBA
From the right side in 2024, before his wrist injury (i.e., facing lefties), Albies had a .390 wOBA (haha) and a .329 xwOBA
From the right side in 2024, after his wrist injury, facing righties, Albies had a .311 wOBA and a .306 xwOBA
From the right side in 2024, after his wrist injury, facing lefties, Albies had a .086 wOBA and .281 xwOBA.
So, it doesn’t seem like we really learned anything. The idea that batting right-handed full-time would hurt Albies when facing lefties doesn’t really make any sense, and the sample is far too small to say that that was definitively going on in his final nine games. But he mostly held his own against righties while batting right-handed. Does this mean anything going forward? Who knows.
Albies had one of the biggest hits by any Brave in a regular season game during the season-ending doubleheader in a right-on-right matchup, as he hit this improbable go-ahead, bases-clearing double off Edwin Diaz:
We all know how that game ended, but given that Albies hit a homer off a righty earlier in the game as well, you can hear the clarion calls for him to bat right-handed full-time getting louder in the distance. That game, for Albies, was the highest-WPA game of his career, the fourth-highest by any Brave since his debut, and the second-highest of the season, after Ozuna’s come-from-behind game-winning homer in Miami in April.
What went wrong?
Pretty much everything else went wrong.
After making strong gains from his weaker side of the plate in 2023, he gave all those gains back last season. Ozzie posted a 112 wRC+ vs RHP in 2023 and that number fell all the way down to a 81 wRC+ in 2024; falls like this absolutely tank his numbers. There’s obviously much more RHP in the majors than LHP, so that 81 wRC+ represented the vast majority of Ozzie’s at-bats and it sunk his overall numbers down below league average. Sure, he underhit his xwOBA a bit against RHP, but not that much and the xwOBA was bad.
Albies’ power numbers also fell off a mountain last season, going from 33 homers and a .233 ISO in 2023, to 10 homers and a .153 ISO in 2024. Given that he isn’t exactly a walk wizard, his power numbers are absolutely critical to his overall production. A high OBP is rarely going to be in the cards for him given his tendency to swing swing swing, but most of the time he covers it up with tremendous power. When he (and the team, and the league...) loses the pop, and you add in the lack of positive defensive or base running value, it’s tough to find something Albies can hang his hat on. At this point in his career, it’s not a stretch to say his power production is the most important part of Ozzie’s game, given how large a percentage it plays in his overall production.
Defensively, Ozzie was better in 2024 vs 2023 but that was mainly because how disastrous he was in 2023. He still not playing “good” defense and his long, slow wind up and terribly weak arm (one of the worst in baseball) removes all margin for error his has on close plays, especially when he’s trying turn a double play. It’s been a concerning trend for a while now and it wasn’t that long ago Albies was a plus defender at his position. There’s always defensive regression as players get older, but at 27, Ozzie’s defense has aged much faster than he has, which isn’t helping.
This feels a little unfair, but Albies’ first game back, batting exclusively right-handed against multiple Marlins right-handers, was pretty much everyone’s worst-case scenario for how the right-on-right experiment would go. In other words, that experiment got started on pretty much the worst note possible. In that game, which ended up being a one-run loss, Albies did the following:
First-pitch inside-out weak flare to right field for an out;
First-pitch pop-out;
2-0 pop-out, when facing the same starter a third time;
Hitting into a double play on a pitch towards the top of the zone on 1-2; and, finally,
Ending the game by reaching out for a slider and rolling it to third for an out.
It’s a little unfair, sure, given the extraordinary circumstances of learning how to hit righties as a righty on the fly, but what a brutal start.
2025 Outlook
Albies has had such volatility the last few years that it’s not clear whether projections are more useful for him than just pointing to what is apparently some kind of even year curse. That said, for 2025, he is projected in the 2.5-3.5 WAR range for Steamer and ZiPS, with above-average hitting (around ten percent better than league average). The Braves would be over the moon to get a season in the higher end of that range from their diminutive second baseman, and would be fine with the lower end, too; if you’re going by the pattern of one up season followed by one down season, he is due for it.
It should be noted, 2025 is also the last guaranteed portion of Ozzie’s contract, with the following two years being controlled via team options. Albies makes such a ridiculously small amount of money that, even given his extreme volatility of late, he’s almost certainly going to be worth his salary, but if the defense at second doesn’t improve here soon, it’s going to be interesting to see if the team views Albies as a continued long-term piece.
2025 will hopefully tell us a lot.
<img alt="New York Mets v Atlanta Braves: Game One" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Udsdx93q_lc6ad949OfRUcmSOLY=/0x0:5283x3522/1310x873/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/73794722/2175036651.0.jpg">
Photo by Todd Kirkland/MLB Photos via Getty Images
The Braves’ diminutive second baseman is on a good year, down year pattern right now. In a lot of ways, Ozzie Albies’ 2024 season mirrored the entire team’s 2024 season. Injuries were a big part of his story, but lack of production while on the field also contributed to an overall frustrating and disappointing season. You could package that description up and hand it out to any number of Braves’ regulars in 2024, and certainly the team as a whole. In the end, Albies was okay and not much more than that, and gave fans some fun debate fodder when he returned batting exclusively right-handed to close out the season.
How acquired
With the departure of Max Fried this winter and the likely departure of A.J. Minter, as well as former mainstays like Freddie Freeman and Dansby Swanson leaving the last few years, Albies now finds himself as the longest-tenured Braves player, making his debut all the way back in 2017, Truist Park’s inaugural season. Originally signed as an international free agent way back in the Frank Wren era (2013), Albies has been in the organization more than a decade now, and still has multiple years of team control left on his current deal, which runs through 2025 but also has two club options for 2026 and 2027 (salaries at $7 million in each of those three years).
What were the expectations?
Albies’ career has been weird amid overall above-average performance. In even years, he’s posted an xwOBA around or below .300; in odd years, he’s posted an xwOBA around .330 or higher. He’s had two pretty blah, sub-2 WAR seasons, marred by both injury and subpar performance, in 2020 and 2022; he’s been a steady, non-injured, close-to-All-Star-level producer in odd years, nearing or exceeding 4 WAR each time from 2019-on.
2023 was one of those great production seasons, where Albies set a new career high with a 125 wRC+. Only his first negative defensive year (after positional adjustment, at that...) prevented him from setting a career high in fWAR (4.1 in 2023, 4.2 in 2019). He even tied his career high with a .326 xwOBA against right-handers, which may have temporarily quieted the “maybe Albies should bat right-handed full time” discussions.
Projection systems clearly don’t care about odd year magic (nor should they), so Albies was generally projected to be a 3ish win guy with above-average hitting and marginally below average defense at second base. Great in a vacuum, but even better when you consider the tremendous value he gives the Braves given his meager salary.
2024 Results
Like pretty much everything else on the position player side last season, things did not go according to plan for Albies in 2024... unless you want to start talking about how even years are apparently cursed for him. After missing half of the shortened 2020 season with a wrist contusion and then enduring an absurd 2022 season where he missed months with a foot fracture, only to return and fracture his pinky the day after being activated, Albies missed time in 2024 with a toe fracture (a couple of weeks early) and a wrist fracture (two months late). As a result, he appeared in just 99 games and got just 435 PAs.
Offensively, it was another slide of a season. His .306 xwOBA was right in line with his off years in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and he didn’t really outhit it. His 95 wRC+ barely avoided being a career low. His defense at second base wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as awful as it was in 2023, so that’s something. He finished with 1.3 fWAR in those 435 PAs, just below the 2 WAR-per-600 benchmark.
Coming off such an impressive 2023 season, 2024 was a steep fall back down the mountain, once again mirroring the team as a whole offensively.
What went right?
Albies’ predilection for contact has always given him near-elite strikeout rate numbers, with said rate usually living somewhere around 16-17 percent over a full season. He was even better at reducing strikeouts in 2024, positing a 14.9 percent strikeout rate, one of the very best in baseball. Of course, the irony of this is that the low strikeout rate is sometimes what can get him in trouble: he swings at everything, in the zone, out of the zone, doesn’t matter — he’s mastered the art of making contact on bad pitches to avoid high strikeout numbers. This tends to wreck his batted ball numbers and leads to a ton of weak contact that usually results in outs, and this was definitely true in 2024, as his career-low strikeout rate also came with a career-low xwOBACON. Wait, we’re supposed to be positive here.
Fortunately, Albies’ defense improved from its disastrous showing in 2023 (-10 OAA, -7 OAA-based runs). Albies’ 2024 mark of -1 OAA-based runs is much more respectable. He’s still miles away from the plus defender he was a few years ago but at least he wasn’t approaching worst second baseman in the league like he was in the year before.
This is also probably the place to talk about Albies’ return to the field, where he batted exclusively right-handed for his last nine games of the year. Nine games isn’t much of a sample, and, well...
From the left side in 2024, Albies had a .284 wOBA and .293 xwOBA
From the right side in 2024, before his wrist injury (i.e., facing lefties), Albies had a .390 wOBA (haha) and a .329 xwOBA
From the right side in 2024, after his wrist injury, facing righties, Albies had a .311 wOBA and a .306 xwOBA
From the right side in 2024, after his wrist injury, facing lefties, Albies had a .086 wOBA and .281 xwOBA.
So, it doesn’t seem like we really learned anything. The idea that batting right-handed full-time would hurt Albies when facing lefties doesn’t really make any sense, and the sample is far too small to say that that was definitively going on in his final nine games. But he mostly held his own against righties while batting right-handed. Does this mean anything going forward? Who knows.
Albies had one of the biggest hits by any Brave in a regular season game during the season-ending doubleheader in a right-on-right matchup, as he hit this improbable go-ahead, bases-clearing double off Edwin Diaz:
We all know how that game ended, but given that Albies hit a homer off a righty earlier in the game as well, you can hear the clarion calls for him to bat right-handed full-time getting louder in the distance. That game, for Albies, was the highest-WPA game of his career, the fourth-highest by any Brave since his debut, and the second-highest of the season, after Ozuna’s come-from-behind game-winning homer in Miami in April.
What went wrong?
Pretty much everything else went wrong.
After making strong gains from his weaker side of the plate in 2023, he gave all those gains back last season. Ozzie posted a 112 wRC+ vs RHP in 2023 and that number fell all the way down to a 81 wRC+ in 2024; falls like this absolutely tank his numbers. There’s obviously much more RHP in the majors than LHP, so that 81 wRC+ represented the vast majority of Ozzie’s at-bats and it sunk his overall numbers down below league average. Sure, he underhit his xwOBA a bit against RHP, but not that much and the xwOBA was bad.
Albies’ power numbers also fell off a mountain last season, going from 33 homers and a .233 ISO in 2023, to 10 homers and a .153 ISO in 2024. Given that he isn’t exactly a walk wizard, his power numbers are absolutely critical to his overall production. A high OBP is rarely going to be in the cards for him given his tendency to swing swing swing, but most of the time he covers it up with tremendous power. When he (and the team, and the league...) loses the pop, and you add in the lack of positive defensive or base running value, it’s tough to find something Albies can hang his hat on. At this point in his career, it’s not a stretch to say his power production is the most important part of Ozzie’s game, given how large a percentage it plays in his overall production.
Defensively, Ozzie was better in 2024 vs 2023 but that was mainly because how disastrous he was in 2023. He still not playing “good” defense and his long, slow wind up and terribly weak arm (one of the worst in baseball) removes all margin for error his has on close plays, especially when he’s trying turn a double play. It’s been a concerning trend for a while now and it wasn’t that long ago Albies was a plus defender at his position. There’s always defensive regression as players get older, but at 27, Ozzie’s defense has aged much faster than he has, which isn’t helping.
This feels a little unfair, but Albies’ first game back, batting exclusively right-handed against multiple Marlins right-handers, was pretty much everyone’s worst-case scenario for how the right-on-right experiment would go. In other words, that experiment got started on pretty much the worst note possible. In that game, which ended up being a one-run loss, Albies did the following:
First-pitch inside-out weak flare to right field for an out;
First-pitch pop-out;
2-0 pop-out, when facing the same starter a third time;
Hitting into a double play on a pitch towards the top of the zone on 1-2; and, finally,
Ending the game by reaching out for a slider and rolling it to third for an out.
It’s a little unfair, sure, given the extraordinary circumstances of learning how to hit righties as a righty on the fly, but what a brutal start.
2025 Outlook
Albies has had such volatility the last few years that it’s not clear whether projections are more useful for him than just pointing to what is apparently some kind of even year curse. That said, for 2025, he is projected in the 2.5-3.5 WAR range for Steamer and ZiPS, with above-average hitting (around ten percent better than league average). The Braves would be over the moon to get a season in the higher end of that range from their diminutive second baseman, and would be fine with the lower end, too; if you’re going by the pattern of one up season followed by one down season, he is due for it.
It should be noted, 2025 is also the last guaranteed portion of Ozzie’s contract, with the following two years being controlled via team options. Albies makes such a ridiculously small amount of money that, even given his extreme volatility of late, he’s almost certainly going to be worth his salary, but if the defense at second doesn’t improve here soon, it’s going to be interesting to see if the team views Albies as a continued long-term piece.
2025 will hopefully tell us a lot.
Link to original article
