Braves Re-Sign Iglesias, Upgrade at Utility Infielder

I don’t want to overstate the value of raw financial power in baseball. The Mets spent more than $320 million on player salaries, not counting luxury tax penalties, and they finished four games over .500. Money can’t buy happiness, or even a spot in the playoffs.

It can, however, buy you a closer and a major upgrade to your bench. So the Braves demonstrated Wednesday, when they re-signed closer Raisel Iglesias for one year at $16 million, and swapped utility infielders with the Astros, sending Nick Allen west in a 1-for-1 trade for Mauricio Dubón.

The Braves went into last season as one of the favorites to win the NL pennant only to tumble to fourth place behind the Marlins (the Marlins!) after befalling a series of farces and calamities that recall A Serious Man. Jurickson Profar got popped for PEDs, Spencer Strider and Ozzie Albies lost their juice, half the roster got hurt, it was a huge mess.

You knew things were going badly when Iglesias could not stop blowing saves. This was one of the best closers of the 2020s, a metronomic relief ace in a world where that’s almost a contradiction in terms. If you extrapolate out 2020’s stats over a 162-game pace, Iglesias was coming off five straight seasons of between 58 and 67 appearances, with an ERA between 1.95 and 2.75, and a FIP between 2.30 and 3.38. To get that pitcher for just $16 million would be a coup.

But as the Braves started 0-7, Iglesias also came out of the gate slow. He blew his first save opportunity, and kept wobbling from there. The nadir came on June 5 — this was the game where the Diamondbacks came back from being down 10-4 in the ninth inning to win. Iglesias took the lion’s share of that beating; he faced seven batters and surrendered three runs, plus another runner he inherited from Scott Blewett.

It was Iglesias’ fourth blown save in his first 12 opportunities of the season. At that point, he was 3-5 with a 6.75 ERA, with two of those wins coming in games where he’d already blown the save.

And the underlying numbers weren’t great either; Iglesias had lost a tick of fastball velocity from 2024, and through the end of May, his slider had generated just nine whiffs against seven hits, five of them home runs.

That’s not what you want. And if you checked out on the Braves’ season…well, about the same time Alex Anthopoulos did, at the risk of being too blunt, you might wonder why in the world the Braves were interested in keeping their 35-year-old closer at any cost, let alone $16 million.

After he hit rock bottom, Iglesias bounced back as if his backside was made of silly putty. From June 6 on, he made 45 appearances totaling 43 1/3 innings. He struck out 48 and allowed only 31 baserunners, one home run, and six earned runs of any type. In back-of-the-baseball card math, Iglesias went 21-for-22 in save situations with a 1.25 ERA and a 1.98 FIP.

I’m not sure it’s possible to completely fluke into numbers that good, but this turnaround came with some underlying changes. He got that lost fastball velocity back and started throwing his fastballs more, which is good; even with the awful start to the season, opponents slugged under .200 against both Iglesias’ four-seamer and sinker. By September, he was barely throwing the slider at all.

Going forward, Iglesias will probably need to be able to throw a breaking ball that doesn’t come with a better-than-even chance that he’ll have to back up third base, but for now, I am prepared to declare him fixed and grant him absolution. Go forth, my friend, and surrender dingers no more.

As much as the Iglesias contract is a tidy piece of business for Atlanta, my first reaction to the Allen-for-Dubón trade was to wonder if there was a gas leak at Daikin Park.

I don’t know if you’d want Dubón’s bat in the lineup every day; he hit .241/.289/.355 in 2025, and only once in the past five seasons has he produced a wOBA that started with a three. But the best Honduran-born baseball player of the past 30 years managed to get into at least 130 games in each of his three full seasons in Houston. How? Well, despite being pretty inept against right-handed pitching, Dubón is far more ept against lefties, tagging them for a 111 wRC+ in 2025. Perhaps more important, he appeared in at least 17 games at five different positions for Houston this past season, and got into three or more games everywhere except pitcher and catcher.

Dubón’s defensive numbers this year were bonkers enough to make him a 2.2 WAR player in just 398 plate appearances. That includes 16 Outs Above Average in a hair over 500 innings across the two middle infield positions. Dubón has been good, even very good, with the glove throughout his career; he won a pair of Gold Gloves during his time in Houston. But I’m skeptical that he woke up on March 1, 2025, and turned into Ozzie Smith in a mech suit.

Still, Dubón is a very useful utility player. Given that the Braves had to plug holes at shortstop, third base, and both corner outfield spots in 2025, it’s clear why they’d be interested in Dubón.

The Braves’ eagerness to upgrade surely has to do with Allen’s performance. Thrust into a starting shortstop role, he hit .221/.284/.251 in 416 plate appearances. Allen was a terrific defender at short; he was third at the position in both OAA and FRV. And I don’t give a damn, because if you’re trying to put together a lineup that’s going to compete in the NL East, you just can’t give 500 plate appearances to a guy with a career 53 wRC+. Not when your two direct rivals have Trea Turner and Francisco Lindor at that position.

So why would the Astros trade Dubón, flawed as he is, for an inferior player? Because they’re trying to get under the competitive balance tax threshold. The Astros already non-tendered Ramón Urías, and downgrading from Dubón to Allen will save $4.3 million in arbitration awards, according to MLB Trade Rumors. Plus Dubón is in his last year of team control, while Allen has three more seasons of arbitration to go. Not that either player is at the level where years of control matter a great deal.

This trade is absolutely the Astros behaving like the friend who never quite brings enough cash to pay his end of the tab, but if the Astros were going to cheap out somewhere, I understand why they’re doing it here.

Dubón is a utility infielder and corner outfielder who hits lefties well, but not righties. Houston currently has the extremely well-entrenched and even more right-handed starting infield of Jose Altuve, Jeremy Peña, and Carlos Correa. If one of those guys goes down, the equally right-handed Isaac Paredes goes and gets his glove out of storage and slides over from DH. In the corner outfield, Yordan Alvarez might be left-handed, but he hits lefties better than almost any right-handed batter on the planet.

The Astros don’t really need a player like Dubón to platoon with three guys at once and make three starts a week. They can live with a guy who can fill in anywhere defensively, and never take a meaningful at-bat. That’s Allen.

So congratulations to the Braves on getting meaningfully better, and congratulations to Astros owner Jim Crane on not having to write as big a check as he used to, while not damaging his team’s roster as much as he could have.