With a franchise as storied as the Atlanta Braves, picking any sort of all-time or even era-specific roster is incredibly hard. There are so many worthy choices and some great players are going to get left. However, The Athletic's David O'Brien put out a pretty strong All-Quarter Century Braves team with one unfortunate exception at second base.
The list, which was limited to Braves players since 2000, features a number of Atlanta luminaries past and present. O'Brien was clever to put Chipper Jones in left field to allow for his and Austin Riley's inclusion. Freddie Freeman got the nod over Matt Olson which makes sense up to this point and Andrelton Simmons rightfully got the nod at shortstop over Dansby Swanson. Again, it was a good and fun list.
But no list is perfect and, in this case, putting Marcus Giles at second base over Ozzie Albies feels like a weird combination of recency bias and disrespect.
Putting Marcus Giles over Ozzie Albies on Braves' All-Quarter Century team just doesn't make sense
Admittedly, if this was based on the best season at given positions, Giles would have a strong case. During the 2003 season, Giles put up a .316/.390/.526 line with 21 homers and 49 doubles which all added up to a 7.9 rWAR season. However, Giles really only had three seasons (2003-2005) that one considered to be good and he was out of MLB altogether after just seven seasons.
As frustrating as Albies has been the last couple of years, people seem to be forgetting just how good he has been since debuting in 2017. Albies has three All-Star appearances, two Silver Sluggers, and he was integral to multiple deep postseason runs including the 2021 World Series championship team. Injuries have robbed Albies of reaching his full potential, but to suggest that he hasn't been consistently excellent for eight plus seasons just isn't correct even when compared to Giles' admittedly strong, but brief peak.
That said, both Giles and Albies were great and everyone, including O'Brien, is going to have their own philosophies and preferences when creating their various Mount Rushmores. This particular choice just feels like Albies' recent struggles are currently coloring the perception of his time in Atlanta as worse than it actually has been.
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