Injuries taketh away and injuries giveth. For Atlanta Braves rookie Nacho Alvarez, Jr., what began as a possible lost season ended up providing the biggest opportunity of his fledgling big league career.
The Braves drafted Alvarez in the fifth round of the 2022 draft. He made his big league debut in 2024 with Atlanta, taking Ozzie Albies’ spot on the active roster for a few days in late July.
What were the expectations?
Entering Spring Training, Alvarez was vying for a big league roster spot, but likely ticketed for Triple-A to continue to work on unlocking power in his offense and being an option if Atlanta suffered an injury at the big league level. Well, surprise surprise, they did!
Alvarez had a horrible 32 PAs at the big league level in 2024, but it was only 2024 PAs. He hit really well in Double-A and Triple-A that year, so his inability to handle run-of-the-mill fastballs in the majors was bizarre. His was the sort of profile that, on paper, suggested he was at least a decent prospect; in practice, though, he seemed to have idiosyncratic issues that potentially made him a low-value fill-in. Figuring out which way he’d lean was a thing the Braves didn’t need to do in 2025, but they got the opportunity to do so anyway.
Alvarez ended up one of the first Braves bitten by the injury bug in 2025 after suffering a wrist injury early in Spring Training, causing him to miss the balance of the exhibition season as well as the first two full months of the regular season. He got an eight-game run in Atlanta in mid-July and returned again when Austin Riley was lost for the season.
In total, he played in 58 games with Atlanta and produced 0.2 fWAR, thanks to his better-than-expected defense at third base. He struggled with the bat — although he, himself, had missed most of the season due to injury — slashing .234/.296/.330 (a 76 wRC+) with two home runs and 15 RBI in 208 plate appearances. Even more concerning was that his offensive line came from outhitting his xwOBA — he may have approached dipping below replacement level if his outputs matched his inputs.
Due to his injury-delayed start to the season, Alvarez, Jr. played in only 20 minor league games — 18 at Triple-A — before finishing the season as Atlanta’s starting third baseman. He showed above average range at third base, and the defense, all-in-all, was pretty good!
He also had a two-homer game in Detroit — his first two career home runs — in late September. It was a real banger of a game, as he amassed over .500 WPA for his efforts, one of the highest totals for any Braves position player in any game this season. Those two homers included a game-tying solo shot in the third, and another to pull the Braves within a run in the eighth. In the ninth, his great day continued, as he tied the game with a single while the Braves were down to their last strike.
Offensively, he struggled. That’s putting it lightly.
With only 14 extra-base hits in those 208 plate appearances, he didn’t provide any power. Despite having excellent plate discipline throughout the minors, he walked only 5.8 percent of the time and struck out at a 23.6 percent clip with Atlanta. He had only an 84.7 MPH exit velocity, almost four MPH less than league average.
Alvarez’ huge issue offensively, which held firm across those 200+ PAs, was that he didn’t actually hit any kind of pitch well. Some guys will come up and be baffled by secondaries but can turn on a fastball. Some guys don’t get their money’s worth on fastballs, but fend off sliders and changeups enough to just be meh at the plate. Alvarez had an xwOBA of .300 or below on literally every single non-fastball, and nothing higher than .306 against either four-seamers or sinkers. Given that the league tends to hit fastballs at a .370ish clip and league-average drops into the .310s or .320s due to non-fastballs, Alvarez being terrible at pretty much every pitch type was a real problem for him and the Braves.
Nor were his issues just an inability to generate any semblance of oomph on any kind of pitch. He was also bizarrely passive at the plate: only 18 players with 200+ PAs in 2025 swung at fewer strikes than Alvarez, and that number actually goes down if you use a different mapping of the strike zone than the one on Baseball Savant. Pitchers threw it down the middle to him way more often than league average, and he took it over 40 percent of the time.
Things were so bad for Alvarez offensively, that the team even did stuff like ask him to bunt in a tie game when he had the platoon advantage. On August 31, at least, he got it down — a capper to a horrible day where he fouled out, struck out, and then grounded out with the go-ahead and tying runs on base to end the seventh.
Alvarez won’t turn 23 until early in the next year’s regular season, so he still has time to develop and mature on the field. Because he missed so much time during the season, Atlanta sent him to the Arizona Fall League for additional work. He ended up hitting pretty well (an OPS in the .940 range), but we’ve seen this sort of thing from him in terms of lesser competition before.
The concerns about Alvarez, Jr.‘s game are still the same as they were coming into this season. Can he play shortstop? He didn’t in 2025, not even in the minors, so that ship has likely sailed. Can he generate any power? Maybe it was because of his wrist injury, but he absolutely did not in 2025. Can he find an approach that works in the majors? He’ll have to stop being so passive, to start with — but it’s not like he was earning a good walk rate despite rarely swinging, so he probably needs to show some pop to get pitchers off of pounding the zone against him.
Those are big questions, and finding positive answers to at least two of those questions will likely be needed for him to carver out a full-time big league role.
If you figure he’ll hit a bit better than what he showed in 2025, and play the same level of defense, he’ll be an okay bench player. That might not seem like praise, and it’s disappointing given his success in the minors, but defining his floor as a role player gives Atlanta flexibility as it builds its 2026 roster. Since he still has options, Atlanta can take their time and see if he can unlock more in his overall game.
