Why Alex Anthopoulos is a believer in Jurickson Profar's breakout

Atlanta's President of Baseball Operations talked to the media last night about the team's free agent signing

Finally, the Braves did something!

After a winter consisting entirely of shedding veterans and only minor league deals in return, Atlanta made a splash on Thursday afternoon with the announcement that they signed outfielder Jurickson Profar to a three-year, $42M deal. He’ll make $12M in 2025 and then $15M in each of 2026 and 2027.

Always a good day when we get a blue box

It’s a surprisingly affordable deal for an All-Star and Silver Slugger that put up a .280/.380/.459 line with a career-best 24 homers, adding 10 stolen bases and finishing with 3.6 WAR.

But the fact that it’s the first time that Profar’s hit for power in his entire career is the reason why he didn’t get a massive deal in free agency. His slug (.459), OPS (.839), and OPS+ (134) were all career highs and there are several who wondered if this was that magical one-year flash of a guy that’ll regress back to career norms.

Alex Anthopoulos doesn’t seem to think so, as he told us last night:

We really buy into, he made some significant swing changes from 23 to 24 with his lower half, added a leg lift. Opened up a stance a little, his exit velocities are up quite, quite a bit. And if you look at his career, he's always been talented, (former) number one prospect, and, you know, the walk rates always been there, the strikeout rates always been there. He's had some decent seasons at times, and then he's had some rough seasons, but you know, the only part of his game that hasn't come is power.

Profar notably went to work noted hitting savant Fernando Tatis Sr. last offseason¹, making mechanical and approach changes to unlock that power. (We broke these down on a podcast earlier in the offseason).

AA saw a direct correlation between the changed mechanics and the power, a rise he compared to other changes he saw in Justin Turner and Jose Bautista:

 He's always had the on base and the contact and all that. He just, the power hadn't come in. And then you really start looking at the swing changes and then you look at how the exit velocity spiked… it correlates. It makes sense. And then you talk to him about it and you have him walk you through it and, you know, it adds up.

The underlying metrics bear out that this season wasn’t a fluke for Profar, with a lot of his inputs showing that the .280 average and .839 OPS were earned:

Lots of red in the batting portion

But the biggest green flag on this statcast profile is what wasn’t on there last year - hard-hit rates.

Remember how Anthopoulos said in the above quote that his power hadn’t really come until last season? It’s hard to put into words exactly how it hadn’t shown up, so let me show you:

Courtesy MLB.com

And it wasn’t a “sell out for power at the expense of everything else” type of situation for Profar - his strikeout rate actually dropped in 2024, from 17.3% to 15.1%, while raising his walk rate a corresponding amount (+1.8%, from 9.6% to 11.4%).

All of those changes and their sustainability led Anthopoulos to explain that they had Profar ranked as the 2nd-best bat in free agency, behind only Juan Soto.²

Is his defense a concern?

For being a converted shortstop and a former number one overall prospect, Profar’s not really well regarded with the glove. You may have noticed from the above Statcast screenshot that he was in the bottom 10% of defenders in baseball, with especially poor marks for his range in left field.

Anthopoulos isn’t as worried as the rest of us about Profar’s ability to hang in left field:

 I think Profar is very solid in left field. Um, we've identified some things. We think there's still some upside there. We'll see. He knows that I mentioned to him that we think there's still another level he can get to defensively. He hasn't played that much outfield - obviously, he came up as an infielder and so on. We did some work on that and we'll see, and he's gonna obviously willing to put in the work and the time and all that. So we think there's some upside there. He can get better, but we think he's solid.

To AA’s point about Profar’s time in the outfield, he never broke 285 innings in the outfield in any given season until 2022, having played at least twenty games at all four infield positions. And in left, he has less than 4,000 career innings, which isn’t a lot for a 31-year-old baseball player.³

One of the biggest things that stands out to me on Statcast’s fielding measures is Profar’s jumps in the outfield - similar to Ronald, he doesn’t get great ones. His reaction, which measures the first step, is close to average, while his routes are slightly suboptimal. it’s his burst, or acceleration after the initial first steps, where he significantly gets dinged by Statcast.

(Ronald, by comparison, grades out poorly on both the reaction and the burst but gets well-above-average grades for his route efficiency.)

I don’t know how fixable that is - it is an overall speed issue (where he grades out with below-average speed of 26.5 ft/sec) - or is it a comfort issue? I can see a scenario where he is taking slower steps while mentally confirming the angle and path of the ball before turning on the jets.

Either way, it’s good to know that the Braves are already working on this.

Where do you bat Profar?

Here’s the big question: Where in the lineup does he hit. As a switch hitter, AA said that he’s pretty platoon-neutral and versatile, and he’s already gone to Snit to start those conversations.

Before Ronald returns in mid-May (?), I think there’s an easy answer: Bat him second.

CF Harris (L)
LF Profar (S)
3B Riley
1B Olson (L)
DH Ozuna
2B Albies (S)
C Murphy
RF Kelenic (L)
SS Arcia

Even after Ronald returns to his customary leadoff spot, I’m still leaving Profar in the two-hole:

RF Acuña
LF Profar (S)
3B Riley
1B Olson (L)
DH Ozuna
2B Albies (S)
CF Harris (L)
C Murphy
SS Arcia

While you run the possibility of a team bringing in a lefty for the righty trio of Murphy, Arcia, and Acuña, I don’t want to take at-bats away from Harris by moving him down. (I’d even be in favor of batting Harris behind Ozuna and moving Ozzie down.)

The Curaçao Connection

AA was asked in the presser about if he talked to Ozzie at all about Profar prior to signing him - the two men, as natives of Curaçao, know each other and talk often.

AA confirmed that he has spoken to Ozzie in the past about Profar but didn’t call him prior to this signing, as they did their usual homework to ensure that he’d fit in well with what some call the best clubhouse in baseball:

I've talked to Ozzie about him in the past. So yeah I talked to some of our guys, but you know, he's been in the league a long time, so there's a lot of different people that have been around him, played with him, and so on. Like we would with any player, you know, we do a lot of our work there.

 The other piece to it too is (he’s) a durable player - played 158 games last year.

And, you know, (that’s) a lot of games. You know, we have guys like Matt Olsen playing 162, but you getting up there: that speaks to makeup, the ability to grind and be able to post. And when you factor in, he played during the winter, then into the season - 158 (games) - then into the postseason. So that's…you guys know, we look at the games played column as well.

But I do think the Curaçao note is worth bringing up, for this reason:

Of the seven highest WAR producers in MLB history from Curaçao, six of them have now played for the Braves:

62.71 - Andruw Jones
37.08 - Andrelton Simmons
21.94 - Kenley Jansen
21.79 - Ozzie Albies
10.42 - Jair Jurrjens
8.40 - Jurickson Profar

The only missing player is 33-year-old Jonathan Schoop (19.50), who last appeared in the majors in 2023 and hit .253 for Algodoneros de Union Laguna in the Mexican League last season.⁴

1. Tatis Sr. also worked with Ronald Acuña Jr. prior to his 2023 MVP season. Maybe keep sending guys to him, yeah?

2. He didn’t explicitly name Soto here - while it’s possible he is really high on someone like Nick Allen, we’re assuming (with good reason) that it’s Soto he’s talking about.

3. By contrast, Ronald Acuña Jr. is 27, has missed significant parts of two major league seasons, and still has almost 6,000 MLB innings in the outfield plus more as a minor leaguer and an amateur.

4. SS/CF Ceddanne Rafaela of the Boston Red Sox could break into this list one day - he’s at 2.7 WAR and has a middle name of “Chipper”, given to him by his mother…who was a huge Braves fan.