Instant Reaction: Jurickson Profar Reportedly Suspended for 2026 Season

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Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Hammer Territory podcast. I am Scott Coleman, and it is something of a mini emergency podcast today because Braves outfielder jerks And Profar has been suspended one hundred and sixty two games for the entirety of the twenty twenty six season for a second positive performance enhancing drug test. The news came down on Tuesday, almost noonish from ESPN's Jeff Passon, and I will say this is going to be an abbreviated emergency reaction show and we will have full coverage of the suspension and the fallout for the Braves a little bit later today, but wanted to get you guys a quick reaction show and what this means for the Braves. So no Jerks and Profar for the twenty twenty sixth season. He will forfeit the entirety of his fifteen million dollar contract for twenty twenty six so the Braves do not pay Profar a dime this season with good reason. Of course, You'll remember that what was it five days into the season a year ago, Profar was popped for a positive PED suspension cost him half of the year and about six million dollars in salary. This really sucks for the Braves. Losing Profar a year ago really hurt this team. And we know they had to just shuttle in to some awful baseball players to be honest, to fill in left field while Profar was out for cheating. And now, as we are four weeks away from opening Day, Profar gets caught cheating again. And we're going to talk about the fallout for the Braves and what this means, but let's talk about Jerkson Profar for a minute. This guy absolutely sucks as a professional. He sucks as a human being. He sucks. The fact that he very clearly now cheated his way to a career year with the Padres in twenty twenty four and bamboozled the Braves into giving him a three year, forty two million dollar contract, rewarding him for a career year which was very likely ped fueled. And I don't know how he was able to mask those steroids in his system for a year, but he did it with San Diego. The Braves reward Profar with a big contract, basically the only big move they made a year ago in the offseason. Five days into the year, he screws the team over and now the Braves are left scrambling with a player who was expected to be their primary DH. He was going to play left field quite a bit and was going to hit somewhere in the top five or six in the order, and now the Braves won't have profar. It's not good. And the challenge, of course, is that we are now in the first week of March. If this suspension would have come down middle of the offseason, the Braves could have adjusted. They would have had fifteen more million dollars to spend. There were free agents available, you would have more time to make a trade. There's not much out there now, and we'll talk about a couple of possibilities at the end of the show and again later on tonight we will have a full reaction with Sean and Stephen breaking down where the Braves go from here. But moving forward, the Braves currently have Dominic Smith in training camp in spring. Not great. Dominic Smith is a veteran who could hit right handed, pitching decently. Eventually, you will get Sean Murphy back from his hip surge. Maybe Murphy could be in the DH role, Maybe you rotate him in Baldwin and play those guys basically every single day. We'll see Ronald Dcunya Junior could become a more of a semi regular DH where you play maybe Eli White in right field and give Ronald time off off his knees off his now twice surgically repaired acls. That's an option. And because you lose the switch hitting ability of Jerks and Profar all of a sudden, Mike Yastremsky, who is very likely going to be in a platoon role, might have to play every day against lefties, and we'll see how it all shakes out. There is a chance the Braves could add somebody in the next couple of days weeks. Who knows. Maybe by the time you're listening to the show, the team will have responded. But there's so little out there and it's hard to imagine a trade of any real significance going down. And maybe Alex and the team got somewhat of a heads up on this. They probably knew, and as of recording this about noon Eastern on Tuesday, the Braves have not confirmed the suspension just yet, so we'll see. I can't imagine that Jeff Passon, who reported it the first time, is wrong, but maybe the Braves have had a couple of days to work behind the scenes to try and add some kind of hitter. Of course, Marcelo Zuna just signed two weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago with the Pittsburgh Pirates, so Ozuna is not available. Andrew McCutcheon is still floating out there, and there's a handful of other veteran hitters, but nobody could. There's a reason. If you're a player and you're unemployed a couple of weeks into spring training, there's a real flaw with your game. Maybe the Braves use this money to go out and sign one of the available starting pitchers Zach Lttel, Lucas Giolito are still available. Maybe you try to make up for the hole in your lineup with another arm. But it sounded like the Braves weren't all that interested in those two to begin with. So we'll see. Maybe they pivot, Maybe they make the most of this fifteen million dollars and say, hey, let's go try to bolster our rotation, knowing that you've already lost Spencer Schwallenbach and you've already lost Hirston Waldrip for at least two months of this season. I gotta say, man, the Braves have just had one thing after another after another after another in the bad news department. And it's funny. I hadn't seen the news just yet, and my co host Brad Rowland texted me a bad word, and I honestly didn't know. What could it possibly be? Was was Ronald Acuna Junior abducted by aliens? Was? I don't know? Was Truest Park on fire? Who knows? Man, Nothing would surprise me at this point. Now the Braves don't have Profar for the at least year. Well Jerks and Profar ever played for the Braves, I hope not. I mean, there's probably an argument to be made the Braves should just cut this bum and say goodbye once he serves out his one hundred and sixty two games suspension. But frankly, you know what, if you wait another year, maybe he'll get a third positive PD test, which would be a lifetime ban for Profar. I don't get it, man, There was no reason to do this if your Profar, I mean, clearly you've been cheating for two years. You had two more years of well paid He was gonna make thirty million dollars the next two years and he just pissed away half of it. And he's cost himself twenty one million dollars with this ped suspension twice. It's really disappointing. What a disaster of a signing. I talked off the top, what a I mean, what a gigantic loser that Jerkson Profar is. This guy is a professional player who knows cheating is never on the table, it should never be an option. And he's done it twice. It's really disappointing. And now the Braves are left scrambling with what twenty four days left until opening day against the Kansas City Royals. We'll see what they do regardless more bad news. I was really hoping the next time we would do a show there'd be encouraging news. The Braves have had a challenging start to the baseball season, just as they did last year, and hopefully because there is some more depth, at least at the moment there's more depth, they're going to be able to weather the storm a little bit better. But this is a real bummer, all right. That is going to do it for this mini emergency reaction show of the podcast. We will have much more in the coming days on this. Maybe the Braves make a move, maybe they make a reaction move to kind of help put a band aid on this, but honestly, at this point, it feels like you're putting a band aid on a bullet hole. We'll see until then. Thank you as always for checking out the Hammer Territory podcast. We'll be back with plenty more coverage in the days to come. Until then, we'll see you Next time, it was