The Braves made the easy calls first. Atlanta exercised Ronald Acuña Jr.'s $17 million option and Ozzie Albies' $7 million option on Thursday, keeping the two longest-tenured stars on the roster right where they've been since they were prospects sharing a minor league clubhouse together.
Neither decision required much deliberation. Both players signed long, team-friendly extensions early in their careers, deals that look better for Atlanta with every passing year, and both options sat well below what either player would fetch on the open market. This is the front office doing arithmetic, not making a bet.
Acuña remains one of the most explosive players in the sport when healthy, a former NL MVP whose 2023 season still stands alone in the record books. Albies has been his double-play partner and the quieter engine of the lineup for most of a decade now, a switch-hitting second baseman who rarely gets the ink Acuña does but has been just as much a part of the core.
What comes next is the harder part of the Braves' offseason. Exercising two cheap options on two of your best players is a formality. Building a roster around them that can get back into October is the actual job, and Atlanta watched a division rival, Milwaukee, close out this postseason with a title while the Braves were home. The front office now has a full winter to figure out how to close that gap, with Acuña and Albies already locked into the plan rather than question marks to be solved.
The next real decisions, the ones that cost real money and carry real risk, start now. Keeping the core together was step one. What Atlanta does around it, in free agency and on the trade market, is the story that actually determines whether 2027 looks any different.