Jon Heyman put a number on the Ronald Acuna Jr. trade chatter Wednesday, and the number was close to zero.
Speaking on the Bleacher Report app, the New York Post reporter called an actual Acuna trade a major longshot. He expects other teams to ask. He does not expect Atlanta to say yes.
That should settle a conversation that never had much of a foundation, and the reason is the contract.
Atlanta Holds Every Card
Acuna signed an eight-year, $100 million extension in April 2019 covering 2019 through 2026. What remains are two club options, 2027 at $17 million and 2028 at $17 million. Both are held by the team.
He cannot reach unrestricted free agency until after 2028. ESPN’s Jeff Passan slotted the 2027 option under the likely-to-be-exercised category, which is the easiest call in baseball.
As SI’s Braves site put it, the control lies with the team. A former MVP and five-time All-Star at $17 million a year is the best value contract Atlanta owns. You do not trade that because he had a bad October.
The Season That Started This
Acuna played 107 games in 2026 and hit .255 with 20 home runs, 55 RBI, a .796 OPS, a 118 OPS+ and 21 stolen bases. That is a good season compressed into two-thirds of one.
The postseason was the problem. He hit .125 with no extra-base hits and ended his season on a groundout to short. Some Braves fans booed him during the NL Division Series, and he acknowledged their frustration afterward.
He is 28, born in December 1997, and he has torn an ACL twice in the last five years, the right knee in 2021 and the left in 2024. That durability record is the only legitimate argument for moving him, and it is also an argument for keeping a player at $17 million rather than paying market rate for someone else.
The Instagram Thing Was Not Evidence
After Game 4 of the NLDS, Acuna said his desire to stay in Atlanta had not changed. Shortly afterward he appeared to remove Braves content from his Instagram and changed his profile picture to a black image reading “desconectado,” or disconnected.
Outlets noticed, and the speculation ran from there. There is no confirmation that it signals anything about where he wants to play. A player with two years of club control and a bad playoff series clearing his social media is a player having a bad week.
Treating it as a trade request is reading a mood as a transaction.
What Atlanta’s Offseason Is Really About
The Braves went 94-68 and won the NL East, their seventh division title in nine seasons. They beat the Phillies two games to one in the wild card series and then lost the NLDS to the Dodgers three games to one, eliminated in Game 4 on October 7.
Their problem was not their right fielder. Atlanta went 1-for-23 with runners in scoring position in that series, and president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos has already declined to promise two healthy starting pitchers for 2027.
That is where the winter goes. Pitching, and an offense that disappeared in October. Acuna at $17 million is the part of the roster that does not need fixing, and Heyman is telling you Atlanta knows it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.