A Healthy Ozzie Albies Is an Easy Call for a 2025 Bounceback

The Atlanta Braves were around the middle of the pack in terms of games lost due to injury in 2024. However, they were one of the hardest hit teams when it came to their top players spending time on the injured list.

2023 NL MVP Ronald Acuna Jr. played in just 49 games before his season was ended by an ACL injury. Rotation ace Spencer Strider made just two starts before elbow surgery ended his season prematurely as well.

Joining the list of injured stars in 2024 was second baseman Ozzie Albies. Though he didn’t experience a tragic ending to his season like his two teammates, a toe fracture and wrist fracture led to two IL stints and 99 games played on the season.

Unfortunately, Albies is no stranger to the injured list. He was limited to 64 games in 2022 due to a broken left foot and a fractured pinky and also missed just over half of the 60-day 2020 season with a bone bruise in his right wrist.

When able to play full seasons, Albies has been one of the Braves’ top offensive options. In his eight pro seasons, he has three All-Star appearances in his career, has won the Silver Slugger at his position twice, and has two 30-homer, 100-RBI seasons to his name.

Albies has followed an alternating trend over the last six years, switching back and forth between healthy seasons and ones plagued with injury. If that trend continues into a healthy 2025, it makes him a prime bounceback candidate.

Health and history give Ozzie Albies great odds to bounce back in 2025.

Albies made his MLB debut with Atlanta as a 20-year-old during the 2017 season. He made an immediate impact with multi-hit affairs in three of his first four career games and homers in two of his first three. He finished that season with a .286 average and .810 OPS in 57 games.

The next year, Albies would be named to his first All-Star Game. The year after that, he would lead the National League in hits and post his highest bWAR in a season to date at 4.9. Two years later, a World Series title.

But after that career-high bWAR season in 2019 is when the injuries started popping up every other year. In 2020, it didn’t result in as big of a hit to Albies’ stats. But in 2022 and 2024, you could see the difference.

In those two years, Albies had the lowest single season averages of his career (.247 and .251, respectively) as well as the two lowest OPS marks of his career (.703 and .707, respectively). Considering he suffered a variety of bone breaks and fractures in those seasons, a drop off in production is understandable.

Those two seasons also saw career lows on batting average on balls in play. Albies doesn’t have a particularly high career mark at .293, but that dropped to .270 in ’22 and .274 in ’24. Luck may have played a part in the drop, but a decrease in quality of contact due to injury may have contributed as well.

And quality of contact is exactly what he saw decrease last year. Per Baseball Savant, Albies had a barrel rate of 6.2% in 2024, a two percent decrease from the previous season, and a hard hit rate of 32%, a seven percent decrease from the year before.

Meanwhile, his plate discipline metrics for the most part didn’t suffer. Albies saw his whiff rate stay almost completely static (20.6% in 2023 vs 20.5% in 2024) while his chase rate (35.1% to 33.6%) and strikeout rate (16.2% to 14.9%) both dropped a good amount.

So it truly seems as though a healthy Albies equals above-average production. The good news is that he should be good to go for 2025. Albies returned late in 2024 for the Braves’ playoff push, though the switch hitter was limited to hitting right-handed. An offseason of rest should return him to his switch hitting ways.

Injuries are one thing no one can predict, so whether Albies actually stays healthy in 2025 is anyone’s guess. If he does, it should be a very good thing for the Atlanta offense.