Drake Baldwin's Outlook for 2026 With the Atlanta Braves
Drake Baldwin hit .274/.341/.469 last season with an .810 OPS, won National League Rookie of the Year, and did it all because Sean Murphy cracked a rib in spring training. That’s where this story starts.
The 2025 Atlanta Braves weren’t supposed to need a 23-year-old catcher from Missouri State to carry anything. They were World Series or bust coming into the year. Instead, the injuries came fast and the lineup went quiet, and Baldwin, a 2022 third-round pick who wasn’t on a single top-100 prospect list before spring training, got thrown into the Opening Day lineup and never left it.
His final line was legit. The .274 average, .469 slugging, and .810 OPS sat in the top six among catchers with at least 400 plate appearances, and the underlying expected stats backed him up. His wRC+ finished at 125. He posted 3.1 fWAR. He beat out Cade Horton, Caleb Durbin, and Isaac Collins for the NL Rookie of the Year award. None of it was fluky.
There was one stretch that looked bad. Baldwin went 1-for-18 early on, and his wOBA ran 286 points behind his xwOBA during that cold snap. That gap doesn’t stay that wide, and it didn’t. He found his footing and spent most of the summer looking like one of the better offensive catchers in the league.
His minor league numbers were fine, not electric. He hit .272 with an .807 OPS across three seasons in the system. Just Baseball ranked him No. 17 overall coming into 2025, which was the highest mark he’d gotten anywhere. That call aged well.
“He’s going to be one of the better catchers in baseball,” an industry evaluator told Just Baseball earlier this spring.
There’s also a draft angle that matters for Atlanta’s front office. Because Baldwin came up through the Prospect Promotion Incentive program, the Braves landed the No. 26 overall pick in the upcoming draft plus $3.5 million added to their bonus pool. For a farm system that’s ranked near the bottom of baseball, those are real resources. That’s not a consolation prize. That’s the front office getting something durable out of a rough year.
The 2026 question isn’t whether Baldwin can catch. He can. It’s whether he can push that wRC+ past 130 and cut into his strikeout rate enough that pitchers can’t build a book on him. Sophomore regression is a documented phenomenon, especially for catchers who put up strong debut contact numbers. What makes Baldwin’s case different is that his expected metrics didn’t contradict his actual performance, they confirmed it. He wasn’t getting lucky in 2025. The contact was real.
Murphy is healthy again, which complicates the roster math a little. But Baldwin earned that job last year and the Braves don’t have a real reason to pull it from him now. He’s 26 heading into 2026 with a Rookie of the Year trophy, legitimate offensive production, and an organization that badly needs a cornerstone piece behind the plate while they use that draft capital to rebuild a thin system from the ground up.