The Atlanta Braves had a brutally disappointing 2025 season.
For a team with a ton of talent, they simply underwhelmed. They'll try to bounce back this time around.
But there's also time to look to the future and wonder what that looks like.
Bleacher Report's Kerry Miller has singled out one potential "nightmare" contract on the books: Austin Riley.
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Riley will earn $22 million per year in each of 2028, 2029, 2030, 2031 and 2032. That's a total of $110 million, beginning when he's 31.
"Riley missed two weeks in May 2024 with an oblique injury and the final six weeks of that season with a fractured hand," Miller writes. "And after making it almost to the All-Star Break unscathed this past season, more core injuries caused him to miss 60 of Atlanta's final 69 games. Worse yet, while appearing in each of Atlanta's first 93 games in 2025, his numbers were way down. He hit 27 home runs in his first 93 games of 2022, but he was operating at a 162-game pace of 24.4 last year. Can he bounce back, or did he peak in his mid-20s? If it's the latter, how much worse might things get by his mid-30s?"
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Assuming that salaries continue to rise for top players, $22 million a year isn't an insanely awful total, as long as Riley still contributes some.
Because of that, Miller only ranks Riley as his ninth-worst potential nightmare contract in baseball.
"Compared to some of the gargantuan contracts out there, Austin Riley making $22M per year is almost a drop in the bucket," Miller writes. "At any rate, by the time the likes of Kyle Tucker, Bo Bichette and Alex Bregman sign their new contracts this winter, Riley isn't even going to rank top 40 in 2026 salary. All the same, his past two seasons have made that 10-year deal look less and less like an actual deal."
If the Braves can put together a few good seasons to come, they'll certainly feel much better about what's due after that.
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