Bob Nightengale wonders if Jurickson Profar ‘scammed’ Braves

A club with World Series aspirations to begin the season, the Braves are 1-8 through nine games, one of their best pitchers might miss the rest of the season, and worst of all, their only notable offseason acquisition, Jurickson Profar, was popped for PEDs.

The veteran earned All-Star honors last year for the first time in his entire career. 2025 was Profar’s 11th MLB season. Very rarely does a player in any sport break out as a star after a decade in the league. The Braves obviously felt Profar’s 2024 campaign was repeatable because his underlying metrics backed up his impressive surface-level stats.

Profar accrued 3.6 bWAR while slashing .280/.380/.459 with 24 bombs and a 135 OPS+ (35% higher than the league average). In the other seasons, he accumulated a TOTAL of 4.8 bWAR and slashed .238/.322/.383 with nine home runs per season on average and a 92 OPS+ (8% below league average).

Like so many other Braves fans, I have already pondered whether Profar swindled the team. Now, national insiders are wondering the same.

“Atlanta, who spent most of their money on outfielder Jurickson Profar this winter with a three-year, $42 million contract, now have to wonder if they were scammed,” Bob Nightengale wrote. “The question now is how will he look when he returns. He hit .280 with a career-high 24 homers and an .839 OPS last season with the Padres, but was it simply a byproduct of PEDs?”

Good question, Bob. That’s what every person in Braves Country is asking. It’s not a coincidence that he had by far his best season the year before getting caught with a PED that is used to mask steroids. We can’t draw definitive conclusions yet, but if Jurickson Profar returns and regresses back to that below-average player, we’ll know that he swindled the Atlanta Braves.