The site will be starting its annual offseason player review series soon — a highlight for some (many?), but also retrospectively focused. What happened, happened, and I mostly find it more interesting to focus on the future, on what might happen, and with what likelihood. This is an artifact of my broad interest in roster construction, an exercise which requires you to pick a target (as many wins as possible, making the playoffs, etc.) and then assembling a set of players under the constraint of a budget whose production distribution curves presumably meet that target across a high proportion of trials.

Anyway, leaving philosophy and personal interest mostly aside, let’s talk about the outlook for Matt Olson. I’ll go through some stuff, and in the end, you’ll vote with some degree of confidence. I’ll explain.

Career-to-date, status

Olson has played in parts of ten MLB seasons and will play in his age-32 season in 2026. He has amassed 31.3 fWAR in 5,197 PAs to date, a rate of 3.6 fWAR/600 PAs — though in Olson’s case, it’s worth noting that he’s substantially exceeded 600 PAs in each of his last five seasons. He has a 133 wRC+ with no notable xwOBA underperformance (.363 wOBA, .367 xwOBA). His value tends to be minorly held back by poor baserunning (half a win lost in 2025, a bit less in 2024). Defensively, he’s at around +3 OAA-based runs per 1,000 innings at first base, which doesn’t even come close to offsetting the negative positional adjustment at first base. He’s had a few superior defensive seasons (2019, 2025) and just one weirdly bad one (2023). Fundamentally, though, Olson’s value largely varies with how well he hits.

Olson is in the fifth year of an eight-year extension that also includes a club option; he’ll earn $22 million annually until the contract expires, with a slight downtick in salary in the option year ($20 million). He’s been remarkably durable, playing in every single game since being acquired by the Braves, and given that he plays first base, there aren’t very many players with less injury risk.

Recent performance

Though Olson’s been a stable presence, the same can’t be said of his offensive performance, even if we focus on just the last three seasons. He was a huge part of the historic Braves offense in 2023, with a 162 wRC+ and 6.7 fWAR, a cause aided by the biggest xwOBA overperformance of his career. Everything went backwards for Olson in 2024 and he finished with just a 117 wRC+ (no wOBA-xwOBA gap to speak of) and 2.6 fWAR. There’s no single thing to point to as the reason for the decrease — Olson was simply worse across the board, and didn’t seem to adjust to being challenged in the zone a lot more.

He rebounded to essentially his career mark in 2025, a 136 wRC+, with his 4.7 fWAR boosted by a great defensive year. Olson, like many hitters, tends to vacillate in effectiveness over the course of the season; in 2025, he seemed to be the only guy making the Braves’ new passive-even-if-not-intentionally-so approach work for him, until changing things around with the adjustment period that entailed, and going on a power binge late in the year when it was clear that there was no reason to stick with the reinvented wheel of an approach. Olson’s overall stats in 2025 will show a much more passive hitter than any previous iteration of himself in a Braves uniform, but the walks, as well as increased selectivity leading to improved contact quality, helped him pull himself out of his 2024 doldrums.

Forecasting

At the time of writing, it does not appear that FanGraphs has updated its player pages for look-ahead Steamer and ZiPS projections. ZiPS tends to get added to the player pages late in the offseason; Steamer will likely be there much sooner, but it isn’t there yet. Still, at this point, Olson is a relatively known commodity, and his in-season-but-wait-the-season-is-over FanGraphs Depth Chart projections, which blends Steamer and ZiPS for 2025 with adjustments for actual 2025 performance, has him at an unsurprising 3.8 fWAR over 686 PAs, which is only a little lower than his career rate over 686 PAs (4.1 fWAR).

Once upon a time, I built my own projection system, mostly to understand how Steamer, ZiPS, and other systems pulled their respective levers. The system largely succeeded at mirroring the existing projection systems despite not having access to any of their inner workings, so I satisfied myself that I understood the big picture of what they were doing and left it aside. But, hey, with not much of a spread to go off of, let’s revive that system for Olson’s look-ahead in 2026.

This is either surprising or not surprising relative to the first paragraph in this section, depending on how much you care about the details. Is Olson expected to be well above average in general? Yes. IWAG sees Olson as hitting marginally better than his career rate but basically just reflecting composite Matt Olson to date. The flavor is the same as whatever Steamer-ZiPS-blend-plus-2025-stuff-that-happened is on the FanGraphs player page right now, but it’s a bit sharper or tangier, with a five-point spread in wRC+, which adds up over 700+ PAs.

One other note before the probability distribution: this isn’t a comment on Olson’s streakiness per se, but Olson clearly has times when he is working through stuff, and times when he’s just raking. The chart below shows wOBA and xwOBA scaled by month (“x/wOBA+”) to league average, just to avoid seasonality. There are always adjustment periods of some sort — sometimes short-lived, or sometimes just a months-long struggle. Olson’s line will generally trend into that 20-30-percent better than league average even when scaling for the weather, and whether he has a down year or an up year seems to depend on how long it takes him to find himself.

Anyway, all that aside, it’s distribution plot time:

Again, no real surprises here. Olson is one of the not-exactly-rare-but-not-common-either guys whose WAR density plot “peaks” to the right of the WAR/600 plot because he’s been so durable. Beyond that, well… this is kind of the most boring distribution you could generate. (As usual, with IWAG production plots, I only include the parts that are not “tails” — the tails for baseball players are absurd and would make the chart a considerably worse visual aid.

Your turn

Alright, I’ve given you the info. Well, some info. You may have your own info. With that, I ask you: