Newly Minted ROTY Drake Baldwin Just Gave the Braves a Gift of a Top 30 Draft Pick

The Atlanta Braves earned an extra draft pick last night for Drake Baldwin winning Rookie of the Year. How should they use it?

For the third time in eight seasons, the Atlanta Braves have a Rookie of the Year.

After outfielders Ronald Acuña Jr. won the award in 2018 and Michael Harris II won it in 2022, catcher Drake Baldwin officially won the NL Rookie of the Year award last night over pitcher Cade Horton of the Chicago Cubs and infielder Caleb Durbin (a former Braves prospect) of the Milwaukee Brewers.

The Horton runner-up finish is just another data point in the argument that MLB needs to have both a pitcher and a position player award; the Braves have seen two of their own hurlers come in as runners-up for ROTY during that stretch. Spencer Strider lost to Harris in 2022, while Michael Soroka lost to then New York Mets first baseman Pete Alonso in 2019.

That additional draft pick that Atlanta will receive for Baldwin’s win will slot in after the first round, estimated to be somewhere between pick #27 to #30. What should the Braves do with that pick? Let’s talk about it.

Baldwin understands the significance of this

We had an opportunity to speak to Drake Baldwin shortly after he won the award on Monday night, and the biggest takeaway I had was how close it was to not happening at all. “Even in spring training, talking with my agent, talking with people around me, (I was) probably going to go to AAA (to start the year). Super content with that - only had half a year with it in 2024. So, even getting the opportunity to make the big league roster and then obviously with (Sean) Murphy coming back, didn’t know exactly how they were going to work around it there.

“Having Alex (Anthopoulos) be able to trust me and keep me on the team was a huge (boost) of some confidence there, that he trusted me.”

Baldwin said that there was never that ‘oh, I belong’ moment, but it was a gradual realization as the season progressed that not only could he stay in the majors, he could perform. “You just start to realize that you’re facing some Cy Young contender or something and you’re like ‘oh, I’m going to have a good at-bat here’ and then you […] start to get more familiar with catching Cy Young guys like (Chris) Sale.”

Baldwin praised the veterans on the team for his success in 2025, explaining that they helped him manage the workload of both performing at the plate and managing a pitching staff. “You’re going in (the dugout) between at-bats, you’re worrying about the pitcher and what he’s going to throw and how to attack the next hitters and the next guys coming in. It’s definitely some learning curves this year, but the people around me being pitchers, being able to talk to me about it and having (Sean) Murphy next to me, having Sandy León next to me. They helped me. They guided me through it.”

Baldwin also discussed his relationship with veteran starter Chris Sale a bit later in the press conference, explaining that Sale’s trust in him really helped him feel like he belonged in the majors from the very first game the two played together.  “The first start, (and) he might not even remember this. It’s fine - I still remember it. It was a tough first inning and we started using this changeup to get out of it, and he came in the dugout and was like, ‘I like the changeup call, great job using it’ and I was just kind of trying some new stuff out! He said that and I was like, ‘Wow. This is pretty cool.’ It definitely gave me some confidence there.”

Atlanta’s reward for Baldwin winning Rookie of the Year will be an additional draft pick, courtesy of the Prospect Promotion Incentive program, placed after the first round in next summer’s MLB Draft.

The team is commemorating the award with a special bobblehead of Baldwin, which will be given away in conjunction with a pregame ceremony on Tuesday, March 31st, prior to the Braves hosting the Athletics.

Photo courtesy of the Atlanta Braves

Single-game tickets for this and the rest of the 2026 season slate go on sale this Friday, November 14th, at 12 PM ET. More details can be found at braves.com/promos.

What this does to the draft pool

The Braves currently have the 6th-best odds at the top pick in next year’s draft, whose specific order will be determined during the 2025 Winter Meetings in Orlando during the MLB Draft Lottery.

Let’s use last year’s 6th overall pick team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, to analyze the potential of Atlanta’s draft next year. Because where you pick in the draft matters.

The Braves had 21 picks in the draft, having received an additional compensatory pick after the fourth round for Max Fried signing with the New York Yankees. That pick was used on infielder Dixon Williams out of East Carolina University.¹ Those 21 total picks totaled a bonus pool of $9.08M, the 8th-smallest pool in last year’s draft.

Most of the explanation here comes down to where Atlanta’s first-round pick was. As the team picked 22nd, the slot value for that pick was $3.98M.

Pittsburgh, by contrast, also had 21 picks but a bonus pool of $14.08M, the 8th-largest pool in the entire draft. With the caveat that their additional pick was worth slightly more than Atlanta’s by virtue of being after the 2nd round instead of the 4th, the size of their pool is largely due to picking 6th. As the first overall pick starts out at double-digit millions and each subsequent pick quickly drops in value, 6th overall was worth $7.56M by itself, 83% of the value of Atlanta’s entire pool.

The Braves will have a lot more money to throw at draft picks next summer, is what I’m saying.

But how much? Well, let’s do some minor math. Let’s take Pittsburgh’s pool from last year ($14.08M), subtract the Competitive Balance pick’s value out ($1.13M), and then add back pick #27² and its $3.38M value for 2025, giving us $16.33M. Once you adjust that for the roughly 5% growth in MLB revenue year over year, which automatically increases the value of every slotted pick, you get $17.15M.

That is a lot of money for Vice President of Amateur Scouting Ronit Shah and the Braves to play with. Mind you, that number will fluctuate up and down depending on how Atlanta comes out in this winter’s Draft Lottery drawing - they could move as high as the #1 overall pick or as low as twelfth - but either way you spin it, the Braves likely walk into next summer’s draft with the largest pool in the team’s history.

But do they willingly sacrifice some of it?

The higher cost of a Qualifying Offer player

I’m trying to decide if getting one additional pick after the first round makes it more or less likely that Atlanta signs a Qualifying Offer player. Having reset their Competitive Balance Tax situation last season, Atlanta’s QO penalty would be losing their 2nd-highest draft pick and $500k from their international free agency bonus pool next spring.

Let’s run through the options here.

The argument for signing a Qualifying Offer player is that this is an extra draft pick. Sacrificing this draft pick to sign a top-tier player is just sacrificing a draft pick that you didn’t have 24 hours ago - the organization would still have its full complement of twenty draft picks, one for each round. It’s hard to miss a draft pick that you were never guaranteed to have, right?

The argument against signing a Qualifying Offer player comes down to where that draft pick is and its value. While it would have previously been a pick somewhere around #50, with a slot value of $1.93M, it is now likely to be inside the top 30, with a slot value of roughly $3.2M. That difference, $1.27M, is roughly equivalent to a pick in the late 60s. As a team that notoriously likes to underslot its early pick to free up funds for splashes in rounds 3-5, would the team give up a pick and $3.2M just to add a Dylan Cease or Michael King instead of a non-qualifying offer pitcher like Chris Bassitt, Lucas Giolito, or Merrill Kelly?

And that’s ignoring the quality of the player you can get at each respective pick. Previous #29 or #30 picks in MLB include starter Cole Ragans (2016), catcher Bo Naylor (2018), shortstop Anthony Volpe (2019), starter Bobby Miller (2020), and top prospects Xavier Isaac (2022) and Johnny Farmelo (2023). Dropping back to pick #50 gives you a lot of players less likely to make the majors, although outfielder Evan Carter (2020) seems to be the modern exception here.

I’ve talked before, on both the newsletter and the podcast, about Atlanta’s reluctance to both pop a qualifying offer and to spend more than $22M AAV on a player - Anthopoulos has never exceeded that salary on a multi-year deal, although the reported deals for both Freddie Freeman and Aaron Nola would have done so had they gone through.

Is the offseason the Braves finally cross that threshold? The money’s there, and the extra pick is as well.

And if it’s not now, when?

1. The Pirates.

2. It’s only 27 and not 30 because four teams exceeded the CBT’s third tier of $281M, so the quartet of Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Mets, New York Yankees, and Philadelphia Phillies should all see their first round pick moved back ten spots. The New York Mets failed to make the postseason, though, and so the lowest that pick would be slotted prior to being moved back is 18th.