Most every Braves star looks like they’re headed to the All-Star Game — even Ronald Acuña Jr. snapped out of his mini-slump with a grand slam in yesterday’s win over the Red Sox — with one glaring exception: Austin Riley.

In August of 2022, the Braves made Riley the highest-paid player in franchise history, handing him a $212 million contract. At the time, he was in the middle of a 6-plus WAR campaign and on his way to another top-six finish in the NL MVP race. He followed it up with an almost identical season in 2023.

It hasn’t been the same since.

2024 wasn’t a disaster, but he posted a career-worst .783 OPS and appeared in just 110 games after ending the season on the IL with a broken wrist. That OPS number dropped by nearly 50 more points last season in another injury-marred campaign, and now he’s off to the worst two-month start of his career — hitting .216 with a .664 OPS.

This is a player the Braves paid like the face of their franchise. They owe him $22 million per season through 2032, and at best he’s been an average third baseman since the start of 2024. The concern is understandable — but stripping away the context makes the situation look considerably worse than it actually is.

Riley has typically been a slow starter. In 2024, he was hitting .228 with a .648 OPS through the first two months before going on to hit .275 with 16 home runs and an .870 OPS over the next 68 games — right up until the wrist ended his season early. A full, healthy 2024 likely produces another 4-5 WAR campaign.

Last year was a different story, but not by much. He got off to a respectable start before an abdominal injury flared up in July, flared again in August, and shut him down for the remainder of the season.

Here’s the thing — at no point in Austin Riley’s career has he gone through an entire season and delivered anything less than All-Star-caliber production. Not once. The slumps have been real, and they can last longer than you’d expect from a player of his caliber. But his ceiling, when he’s right? There aren’t many players in baseball who can match it.

Most won’t see it that way. They’d rather declare him the worst contract in franchise history and ship him to the Mets for three bags of baseballs and a broken laundry machine. But the evidence simply doesn’t support that conclusion. He has never failed to perform over a full, healthy season — and until that changes, there is no reason to believe it will.

Baseball is the world’s most humbling sport. Low points happen to every player, no matter how talented — just look at Michael Harris II, who is putting together one of the best seasons on the team after a couple of down years by his standards. The panic meter for the highest-paid player in Braves franchise history stays at zero.

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(Photo by Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire)