2025 Team Previews - Atlanta Braves
As part of my 2025 team previews series, I go through all fantasy-relevant players on the Atlanta Braves ahead of the 2025 season.
Check out the intro and team links page here.
Intro
What goes up must come down! The Braves really bottomed out last year. They had multiple players go from career-bests to near career-worsts. They still sneaked into the playoffs even with all of that, and that’s a testament to their roster depth.
It feels like the Braves are set for a bounce-back season where they’ll compete for a divisional title again. However, they’ll have trouble getting back to the heights of 2023 with Ronald Acuna Jr. still recovering from knee surgery, Spencer Strider working his way back from an elbow procedure, and Max Fried and Charlie Morton having departed via free agency.
Roster
Acuna doesn’t show there, as he’ll start the year on the IL. The right field thing to me looks like a platoon of Kelenic (vs. RHP) and Bryan De La Cruz (vs. LHP). After Acuna returns, that platoon hits the bench.
The rotation will get a big boost when Strider returns, probably in May. That certainly pushes Ian Anderson out, and I tend to doubt he’ll have a spot even at the beginning of the year.
It’s a potentially elite rotation, but there are plenty of question marks about health.
Hitters
Ronald Acuna Jr.
Age: 27
Pos: OF
As already mentioned, Acuna won’t start the year in the lineup. We aren’t sure when exactly he’ll be back. The best guess would be May. He is tough to rank because of this, and drafters have gotten less and less interested as draft season has progressed.
The other consideration is how much he’ll run when he does get back. The knee might not be 100%, and the Braves might not want him to push it, at least not early on.
What we shouldn’t forget is the ridiculous upside he has. Ohtani’s 2024 season makes it easy to forget about what Acuna did in 2023. The guy had a 40-70 season. You might even say that’s more impressive than 50-50. He also hit .337 along with it!
My projection is updated to reflect all of this. I’ve cut his stolen base attempt rate in half. That might be too harsh, but that might not be harsh enough. There is a lot of unknown here.
If your draft is not until mid-March, you’re in fine shape. You don’t have to worry about any of this. For early drafters, I’d want to take a shot or two at Acuna’s upside, but I think I’m leaning toward playing it safer with my second and third-round picks rather than rolling the dice on him being healthy enough to have another elite fantasy season.
Rank
Projection
575 PA, 90 R, 24 HR, 87 RBI, 22 SB, .296/.381/.504, $15.00 roto value
Ozzie Albies
Age: 28
Pos: 2B
Albies is a tough one. In the last four years, he’s had two elite seasons and two really bad ones. The main problem in those two bad years has been health. Check out the season log here:
You do see that health and performance have gone hand-in-hand. His OPS values were way down in those two years in which he didn’t stay on the field.
The strikeout rate has been mostly consistent, and the HR + SB production has been at least fine each season.
Albies is also tough to figure out because he does not hit the ball hard. His barrel rates in those two 30-homer seasons were 9.3% and 8.2%. Neither of those numbers is very high. He was hyper-efficient in those two seasons. I checked all the recent 30-homer seasons and found just 22 examples of a hitter going above 30 homers with a Brl/PA rate under 7.5%.
Both of Albies’ seasons show up there. That doesn’t mean he can’t do it again, and the fact that he’s done it twice does negate some of the fear that it was very lucky, but it does make us hesitate to project that many homers.
I’m back on Albies this year. You know I like to focus on “buy low” players in the draft, and Albies is one of those this year. And it’s for two reasons! First, he himself had a bad season last year because of those injuries, so there’s “bounce back” potential there. Second, I think the Braves lineup as a whole should improve, which should push the R+RBI production upward for everyone.
I don’t think we’ll see many 950-run seasons in the near future (like we saw from the Braves in 2023), but it’s fair to think they can get back closer to 800. That gives a lot of runs + RBI potential, especially at the top of this lineup, where Albies will be.
And then, of course, there’s the second base thing. I’ve said it many times, but I’ll say it again - it’s a brutal position this year, so getting an elite season out of your 2B is a big advantage.
I can’t call Albies the safest player in the world, but I’m happy to take him at his new price (a third or fourth-round pick!).
Rank
Projection
673 PA, 91 R, 21 HR, 78 RBI, 13 SB, .261/.319/.429, $12.97 roto value
Austin Riley
Age: 27
Pos: 3B
I somehow missed him in the first version of this. I’ve done that a few times, but I’m back to make it right.
Riley also had a down year in 2024. His was mostly to blame on injury, though.
649 PA, .256/.322/.461, 19 HR, 0 SB
That’s a pretty brutal fantasy season. He missed a couple of weeks in May with a side injury, and then his season ended on August 20th after he fractured his right hand getting hit by a pitch. The SLG fell a long way from his previous heights, and you’d have to think injuries were at least partly to blame.
The exit velocity stayed elite (108.4 90th percentile), and the Brl% stayed super high at 14.9%. The K% has never been great, but he’s gotten it under control and settled at 25% last year.
I’m betting on a bounce-back from Riley. He’s a pretty easy guy to figure out. The power is great, and the batting average doesn’t hurt. You don’t get steals from him, so you’ll have to keep that in mind in the earlier rounds if you’re taking him.
The one thing I’ll say is that this specific player type is one of the easier ones to replace later in the draft. You can usually find someone who can hit you homers and drive in runs. It’s not a guarantee, and the solidity is always nice - but Riley isn’t a player type I’d go out of my way to get in a roto league.
Rank
Projection
646 PA, 90 R, 29 HR, 98 RBI, 3 SB, .260/.334/.474
Matt Olson
Age: 31
Pos: 1B
This Braves stuff is really interesting. Basically everybody had a career year in 2023, and then most of them had near career-worsts last year. Olson had another year of playing every day but could not get anywhere near those 2024 heights.
It’s the same story as Acuna and Albies. He was never going to repeat that 2023 season, but nobody expected him to come so far down.
The difference between Olson and Albies is that we aren’t getting much of a discount on Olson. I think his price is basically correct.
You could argue there’s a pretty big drop-off after those top five, so Olson would be a target of mine if I’m trying to get in at the end of the top tier.
We should also figure out if there’s any reason to be very worried about the production drop. Let’s check the advanced stats.
The K% was up a little bit, but not to a point where we should be concerned. The barrel rate stayed strong at 12%, and he kept getting the ball in the air. Another significant change we saw was in the approach. He swung more (47% → 50%) and consequently walked less (14.4% → 10.4%). Pitchers seemed to go after him a lot more:
Maybe that was because they became more afraid of Marcell Ozuna than him and wanted to make sure they didn’t put him on base for free. Pitchers threw more strikes to the Braves overall last year:
Some of that was because pitchers, as a whole,e threw more strikes last year:
And it could have also just been that pitchers weren’t as afraid of the Braves lineup since they were performing so much worse than the prior year. I don’t know; I think we’re too far into the weeds here.
Sometimes, the correct answer is the most simple. The Braves wildly over-performed in 2023 and then under-performed in 2024. The 2025 season will very likely be somewhere in the middle, and that makes a lot of these guys strong values to draft.
Rank
Projection
649 PA, 89 R, 31 HR, 86 RBI, 3 SB, .251/.349/.474, $11.75 roto value
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