What to make of Profar's 2024 ... and his free agency case

One of the starting outfielders from the 2024 All-Star Game is out there available in free agency, yet you’ve barely heard a peep about him all winter. In fact, it’s been nearly a month since his last rumor entry on MLBTradeRumors popped up. If not for the obvious name atop this article, you’d probably be sitting here wondering who on Earth we might be talking about.

We mean, of course, Jurickson Profar, who spent years being mostly forgettable, right up until he wasn’t. If you’re thinking going from “released by the Rockies,” as he was in Aug. 2023, to “starting in the All-Star Game less than a year later” is an unusual career path, it is, though for prospective suitors, it comes with a larger question that can be summed up thusly:

How much should we believe in an 11-year veteran who posted a 4.3 WAR season in 2024 after spending his first 10 seasons combining for all of 4.9 WAR?

Worries about a suddenly big year not being the new normal are exactly what made Cody Bellinger’s journey through free agency last year difficult. For the most part, the worries were valid: Bellinger had a good-not-great year in 2024 that didn’t match up with his 2023, and he was traded to the Yankees this winter mostly to offload his salary. For Profar, then, who has far less of a track record of success than Bellinger (who has Rookie of the Year and MVP Awards in his trophy case), why should we believe his great year was less of a fluke?

There is, at least, some evidence to back it up. We’ll get into the details, but let’s start with a pretty simple picture. Hit ball hard.

As opposed to Bellinger, who managed to put together a strong 2023 with an unimpressive (and career-weakest) 10th percentile hard-hit rate, Profar’s exploded. He really did hit the ball hard, and that’s difficult to fake. Yet the obvious question is, “Well, why didn’t he ever do it before?”

It is, to say the least, the continuation of a bizarre career path that’s worth revisiting, because it informs just how long a road this has been.

Profar, baseball’s consensus No. 1 overall prospect way back in 2013, made it to the Majors as a 19-year-old shortstop for the Rangers, but shoulder injuries cost him the entirety of his age-21 and age-22 seasons.

When he came back in 2016, at 23, he spent the next two years bouncing between the Majors and Minors as a utility player, generally not hitting; while he did post back-to-back 20-homer seasons in 2018 (with the Rangers) and 2019 (A’s), the overall value (3.2 WAR combined) was somewhat muted by poor on-base skills and poor infield defense.

From there, it was on to San Diego, and the outfield, and alternating seasons that were decent (2020, ‘22) and lousy (‘21), before signing with Colorado for 2023, where again, he played so poorly that a 103-loss team simply cut him loose. He returned to the Padres for the final weeks of the season, then signed a one-year deal for 2024, which guaranteed him a mere $1 million (which he more than doubled through reaching incentives).

That contract ended up being the steal of the winter when he hit .280/.380/.459 with 24 homers, a batting line that was top-15 in MLB among qualifiers, and similar to stars like Mookie Betts, Corey Seager and Francisco Lindor. Despite further poor defense (minus-7 runs, per Statcast) he still posted that 4.3 WAR, which was one of the best San Diego outfield seasons of the century. He was no small part of why the 2024 Padres did so much better than their disappointing 2023 predecessors.

So: What, exactly, do you do with that?

Any interested team will be asking itself these two questions:

• How flukish was the year? Can you point to obvious good luck, or did something real change?

• If it doesn’t seem flukish, then what was the change, and can it persist?

Let’s put on our general manager hats and try to find the answers.

1. How much of a fluke was this?

There are a few obvious stats to start with to try to answer this. At the simplest level you might look at BABIP (Batting Average on Balls in Play), and it’s true that Profar’s .302 was the highest of his career, but that’s not an egregious number and didn’t even rank in the top 50 among qualifiers last year. It also would be explained to some extent anyway by how much harder he started hitting the ball. It’s probably not that.

If you move onto the expected stats – Statcast metrics that look into the usual outcomes of how hard and how high a player hits the ball – Profar in reality had a .280 average and a .365 wOBA, which line up almost perfectly with his expected average of .282 and expected wOBA of .364. No luck detected.

Not to continue to pick on Bellinger, a solid player who was a nice addition for the Yankees, but his case provides some useful parallels. In 2023, his actual wOBA exceeded his expected number by 43 points, one of the largest gaps in the game, which was a concern for his 2024 projections. As it turned out, most of the other overperformers, like TJ Friedl, Jeimer Candelario, and Whit Merrifield, also took a step back in 2024. That’s less of an issue for Profar.

Bellinger could at least make the reasonable argument that he’d sacrificed power for contact, having cut his strikeout rate from 27% to 16%, the second-largest improvement that season. Conversely, Profar pulled off the neat trick of adding the most hard-hit rate of anyone in the game without making less contact to do it, because his strikeout rate actually dropped from 2023.

Put it all together, and nearly everything about Profar’s season screams real, including the fact that he was better from both sides of the plate, posting career-best OPS as a righty (.885) and a lefty (.823), and that he was consistently excellent in five of the six months, setting aside an August slump. This wasn’t a red-hot three weeks that influenced his season line. This wasn’t about a massive change in approach, because while he did chase a little less, his other swing rate stats were consistent.

It was mostly about “hit the ball a whole lot harder all season long,” which is exactly what he did. In 2023, he hit the ball about as hard as Miguel Rojas. In 2024, he hit it about as hard as Carlos Correa or Salvador Perez.

The only reason to doubt it, really, is all of the years it didn’t happen before. Which leads us to our second question:

2. How did he manage that?

This is where it gets tricky, because we have anecdotal evidence, but nothing concrete.

We know he added a leg kick. That seems like an obvious visual change …

… but this is hardly the first time he’s messed around with his stance, either.

We know he spent time in the offseason working with Fernando Tatis Sr., telling The Athletic in May that “playing [in the Dominican Winter League], it just kind of helped me a little bit here because I was talking to Fernando [Jr.]’s dad and he just unlocked the baseball side of me that I left.”

… but he’d done that before, too, working with Tatis Sr. prior to a good-not-great 2022 season – although at least this time, he said that “[Tatis Sr.] fixed something in my [pre-swing] load in Spring Training.”

It’s tempting, then, to look at bat speed, to wonder if Profar is like Gavin Lux, Jeff McNeil, Anthony Volpe, or Victor Robles, players who found increased production as 2024 went on by swinging harder. But while we only have official data beginning in 2024, we do have a small amount of unpublished 2023 test data, and that shows Profar upped his bat speed by only a tiny amount, less than 1 mph.

So it might not be that, either. There are some other small clues here and there, too. He also told The Athletic that “in 2018, with the Rangers, I had a really good year, too … but then I went away from it, trying to launch.” That would be compelling evidence except that between 2018-’19, there were almost no changes to his underlying metrics like hard-hit rate, strikeout rate, and walk rate, other than an increase in pulling the ball.

It’s wild, in some ways, to think that a baseball fan in 2012 would have had no reason to doubt the sentence: “In 2024, Jurickson Profar will be an All-Star hitter,” while a baseball fan in 2023 would have thought you’d lost your mind.

Profar has been open that he’d like to return to the Padres. He said to MLB.com in October that “I want to be here. This team, I think they have all the things to win a World Series. Mike Shildt built a beautiful thing here. Hopefully I'm part of it." He also fairly noted that “they've got to want me, too.”

They certainly could use him. As of Tuesday, FanGraphs has the San Diego left-field situation projected as the weakest of any of the 30 teams. But they’re not the only ones in that boat. If it’s not the Padres, it’ll be someone else.

Whoever it is will be interested to know that one of the most unexpected All-Star years in history -- only three All-Stars ever made their first team later in their career than Profar did, setting aside the initial class -- looks a lot less like a fluke than you’d think.