The diminutive shortstop played Gold Glove-caliber defense as a surprising starter for the Braves, but his offensive production was the worst in baseball, making it only a one-year escapade with Atlanta for the 27-year-old.
The Braves traded for Allen on November 11, 2024, sending minor league pitcher Jared Johnson to the Athletics. At the time, it seemed like one of those nothingburger moves that gave the team additional depth behind incumbent shortstop Orlando Arcia.
What were the expectations?
Allen was perhaps an option at shortstop for Atlanta coming into 2025, but not the option. The highly-regarded defender provided the team insurance up the middle for the struggling Arcia and the returning-from-injury second baseman Ozzie Albies. If Atlanta had upgraded the shortstop position prior to Spring Training, it was possible Allen would have been squeezed off the roster. However, he was expected to fill an end-of-the-bench role while providing exceptional defense when on the field.
To say Allen couldn’t hit major league pitching was either an understatement (if you took it figuratively), or an overstatement (if you took it literally). He came into 2025 with a career 53 wRC+ in 760 PAs, with no wOBA/xwOBA shenanigans going on. He also wasn’t exactly playing stellar defense, despite that being his calling card in theory: coming into 2025, he was at +1 OAA-based runs at second in about 300 innings, and +7 OAA-based runs at shortstop in about 1,550 innings. The latter number is certainly nothing to sneeze at considering the difficulty of the position, but it’s also not some kind of world-beating, slam-dunk number. As a result, Allen’s outlook for 2025 was basically “he’ll support you defensively but he’ll hit so poorly he’ll hurt you more than he helps with his glove.”
It didn’t take Allen long to take hold of the starting shortstop job with Arcia seemingly having lost a step in the field and offering little with the bat. It was kind of a shocking turnaround, perhaps aided by the fact that Arcia spent most of Spring Training making outs as quickly as possible and returning to the dugout shade. By the time Atlanta released Arcia on May 25, the soon-to-be Colorado Rockies shortstop had appeared in only 14 games for the Braves. Allen started the second game of the season, and then after Arcia started games three through five, Allen got the bulk of the shortstop duty going forward. Arcia’s last start was April 22; Allen started all but three games at short for the Braves for the next four months.
As for Allen, the former third-round pick of the Athletics, he started out with a hot-for-him bat carrying an OPS of almost .700 (95 wRC+) through the end of April. That said, he was massively outhitting another poor xwOBA in that span, and after pingponging between his standard level of bad and maybe something not quite that poor in May and June, he sunk into “wow, he might actually have a wOBA and xwOBA below .200 for an extended stretch” in July and August. Eventually, with little left to lose, the Braves gave some starts to Vidal Brujan, and then had Ha-Seong Kim start nearly full-time down the stretch after the latter was claimed on waivers.
In total, Allen finished with a .245 wOBA, .250 xwOBA, and 53 wRC+. That’s the exact wRC+ he came into the season with, so at least he’s consistently awful offensively?
Despite his proficiency defensively, he wasn’t very fast (basically a dead-average sprint speed), so he cost the team on the bases thanks to getting thrown out seven times against just eight steals.
On the flip side, the numbers matched the description of his defensive acumen, as he put up 12 OAA-based runs at short in about 1,050 innings of work. As a result, he finished, with 0.7 fWAR, a career-high (he was below replacement the past two seasons).
The defensive breakthrough was the main thing that went right. 13 runs above average defensively in not even a full season is heady stuff, and the range component of OAA reads as a cool 99th percentile in Allen’s Baseball Savant player page. It was so good that Allen, deservedly, ended up as a Gold Glove finalist… though he also deservedly lost to Masyn Winn, who along with Bobby Witt Jr. outplayed even Allen defensively at the shortstop position in 2025.
And, hey, the baseball season is long, so it’s not like Allen was just completely devoid of any good days at the plate. As a kind of last hurrah, he had a great game on August 16, finishing 3-for-4 with a two-run double, and his only “out” actually resulting in him reaching base anyway due to a flubbed fielder’s choice. That outburst came amid a horrid August offensively, and showed that yes, even Nick Allen can hit a ball over an outfielder’s head once in a blue moon.
Fundamentally, it was a hallmark of the Braves’ poor 2025 season that they really couldn’t improve on Allen in any way when it mattered. No player with as many or more PAs as Allen did worse than his 53 wRC+; in fact, the next-closest guy was Ke’Bryan Hayes at a 65. You have to drop down to 326 PAs (Allen had 416) to find another guy with a 53 wRC+; you have to drop down to 286 PAs to find a guy with a lower wRC+.
Allen’s lack of pop is pretty much terminal for him at the plate. Not only did he not have a homer, he didn’t even barrel a ball all season. His strikeout and walk rates were just marginally worse than league average, but he had pretty much the worst contact quality in baseball. For a guy with no pop, he was hurt more by non-fastballs, even though his swing decisions were pretty average-y. He had a short, slow swing, that somehow got even slower in 2025 than it was previously; bizarrely, he insisted on catching the ball out in front anyway, despite a pretty flat swing that gave relatively less benefit to doing so.
And, the Braves didn’t really have many options to not let him hit. Or play. He had 28 PAs in high leverage, and 208 PAs in medium or high leverage. One time, this happened (thankfully the Braves won the game anyway), on a ball that he amazingly hit over 98 mph… just into the ground. Whoops.
Allen was so good defensively, it is tough to consider 2025 anything other than a success for the San Diego native given his track record. Had Atlanta’s offensive production not suffered due to the performances of Albies and center fielder Michael Harris II — not to mention the various other injuries, suspensions and offensive ineptitude chronicled by almost all Braves followers — Allen’s black-hole offense may have been swept under the rug due to his otherworldly range on defense.
While Allen was expected to be an fallback option if the team wasn’t able to re-sign Kim or otherwise upgrade shortstop, Atlanta opted to trade Allen to the Houston Astros for two-time Gold Glove-winning utility guy Mauricio Dubón. Dubón will provide the Braves with a higher offensive floor than Allen while providing excellent defense at multiple positions around the diamond — including shortstop where is is currently penciled in as the starter in 2026.
For Allen, he’ll head to the Astros to be a cheaper version of Dubón, giving the team a sterling defender on the infield, in what is likley to be a back-up role, especially since Jeremy Pena is far less likely to be supplanted from his position than Orlando Arcia ended up being in early 2025.
Allen actually projects as a decent, 1 WAR-ish-if-given-a-full-season-of-playing-time bench player, which is more or less what he was in 2025. That’s not horrible to have around, but you wonder if someone is going to figure out a way to unlock something, anything in him offensively that could help him be worthy of a bit more playing time, because his defense is fun to watch.
