Six Braves Minor Leaguers Who Deserve Their Flowers
Not every player worth watching is a highly ranked prospect. These six Braves minor leaguers have earned a little more attention.
If you missed it, two weeks ago we released Braves Today’s first-ever prospect rankings, a list of the top 50 prospects in Atlanta’s system. Trust me when I say this: it is an exciting time to be a Braves fan, both for what is happening right now and what could be coming in the future.
But prospect rankings can only tell you so much.
There are always players who slip under the radar for one reason or another. Maybe they were a late-round draft pick. Maybe they never had much prospect hype to begin with. Sometimes it’s simply because they are older than the players we typically get excited about in the minor leagues.
Whatever the reason, good baseball deserves to be recognized.
Atlanta has a lot of exciting names throughout its farm system, and while the top prospects naturally get most of the attention, I want to make sure some of the other guys get their flowers too. This season, there are six players in particular who have caught my attention despite rarely being discussed among the bigger names in the system.
So that is exactly what we are going to do.
Patrick Clohisy (24)
.291 AVG | .372 OBP | .485 SLG | .857 OPS | 127 wRC+
The first guy receiving his flowers might be playing so well that I need to move him way up our prospect rankings just to catch up. Patrick Clohisy has seemingly broken out.
The 11th-round selection in 2024 out of Saint Louis has improved every year since entering the organization, and this season has easily been his best yet. In 26 games after being drafted in 2024, Clohisy batted .234 with a .626 OPS and 92 wRC+ between Single-A and High-A. The following year, he improved to a .254 average, .681 OPS, and 111 wRC+ between High-A and Double-A.
This year, Clohisy played 70 games with Double-A Columbus and batted .261 with a .788 OPS and 110 wRC+, earning himself a promotion to Triple-A Gwinnett. Since arriving there, he has somehow found yet another gear.
Through his first 24 games with the Stripers, Clohisy has batted an absurd .388 with a 1.087 OPS and 185 wRC+. Is it a small sample size? Absolutely. But he is leading the team in each of those categories, so I am not going to completely brush it aside either.
He has 31 hits in 80 at-bats, including eight doubles, a triple, three home runs, and 14 stolen bases. Maybe even more encouraging is what has happened with his plate discipline. His strikeout rate has fallen from 21.4% in Double-A to 17.4% in Gwinnett, while his walk rate has climbed from 10.0% to 12.0%.
Yes, he is already 24, which can almost feel ancient in prospect circles now that we regularly see players reaching the majors at 20 or 21. But this is actually a pretty reasonable age for the level, especially for an 11th-round college selection.
At the rate he is going, it is becoming difficult to imagine Clohisy not getting a legitimate opportunity in Spring Training next year. Whether he wins a job is another conversation, but he is quickly becoming someone I could see competing for a bench outfielder role.
Dalton McIntyre (23)
.271 AVG | .353 OBP | .397 SLG | .750 OPS | 104 wRC+
Stop me if you have heard this one before, but another late-round Braves draft pick is starting to make some noise in the minor leagues.
Dalton McIntyre was selected in the 19th round of the 2024 MLB Draft out of mid-major powerhouse Southern Miss. He made his organizational debut in 2025, recording a .665 OPS at the complex before Atlanta aggressively pushed him to High-A Rome, where he understandably struggled.
This season, however, the bat-to-ball skills he showed at Southern Miss have started to come back.
McIntyre opened the year with Single-A Augusta, batting .320 with a 132 wRC+ across 29 games before earning another shot at Rome. This time around, the results were much more encouraging.
Compared to his previous stint at the level, McIntyre improved his batting average by 80 points to .241, raised his OPS by more than 150 points to .627, and dropped his strikeout rate by 7.5 percentage points to 20.3%. That was enough for Atlanta to challenge him again.
After only 18 games in Rome, McIntyre was promoted to Double-A Columbus, where he has slashed .238/.344/.362 with a .706 OPS and 95 wRC+ through his first 33 games. Those numbers are not going to jump off the page, but I think the context matters here. This is a 19th-round pick who has already played at three different levels this season and continues to hold his own as Atlanta pushes him up the ladder.
He is one of several outfielders in this system jockeying for position to potentially become that fourth or fifth outfielder type at the big league level. There is still a long way to go before we can confidently project him into that role, but for a player drafted as late as he was, simply putting himself into that conversation is noteworthy.
Cooper McMurray (24)
.244 AVG | .371 OBP | .396 SLG | .766 OPS | 110 wRC+
Cooper McMurray is a little older than I would ideally like for the level, so I want to get that disclaimer out of the way immediately. Still, his improvement is worth paying attention to.
McMurray signed with Atlanta as an undrafted free agent following last year's draft after playing at Auburn. The 6’4 first baseman jumped directly into High-A after signing, but things did not go particularly well. He managed only nine hits across 21 games while striking out at a 36.3% clip.
Similar to what Atlanta did with Alex Lodise, McMurray was sent down to Single-A Augusta this season to work through some of those swing-and-miss issues. Have they completely disappeared? Definitely not.
McMurray is still striking out 33.6% of the time, which is much higher than you would like to see from a 24-year-old in Single-A. His 36.6% whiff rate and 69.1% zone contact rate remain legitimate concerns that cannot just be ignored.
But there has also been real progress.
His .244/.371/.396 slash line has improved by more than 100 points in each category from last season. His OPS has jumped nearly 300 points to .766, his wRC+ has climbed more than 30 points to 110, and his walk rate has increased by more than six percentage points to an impressive 16.4%. That is enough improvement for me to at least keep watching.
The biggest question is going to be whether McMurray can tap into enough power to offset the swing and miss. At his size and position, the offensive bar is naturally going to be higher. I am certainly not sitting here telling you we have found Matt Olson's eventual successor, but a left-handed bat with above-average pop becomes interesting if Atlanta can continue cleaning up some of the holes in his offensive profile.
Kevin Kilpatrick Jr. (25)
.251 AVG | .333 OBP | .390 SLG | .723 OPS | 96 wRC+
A 17th-round selection back in 2022 out of Central Florida by way of Redan High School, Kevin Kilpatrick Jr. is starting to come into his own.
Across three seasons between High-A and Double-A, Kilpatrick batted just .228 with a .632 OPS. At 25 years old, it was fair to wonder if he was beginning to settle into more of an organizational depth role than someone we should continue viewing as a prospect to watch.
This season has at least reopened that conversation.
With Double-A Columbus this season, Kilpatrick is slashing .251/.333/.390 with a .723 OPS. Those numbers by themselves are solid, but they are not necessarily why he made this list. It is what he has done lately that really caught everyone’s attention.
Over the past 30 days, Kilpatrick has posted a .974 OPS while slugging .588 with five doubles and three home runs. Narrow it down to just the past two weeks and his OPS jumps all the way to 1.200, which ranks fourth best in the entire Braves system over that stretch.
More importantly, there has been a noticeable increase in power.
Kilpatrick has already set a new career high with six home runs despite doing so in significantly fewer at-bats than previous seasons. There’s probably never going to be huge power in his profile, and I do not think anyone should suddenly view him as some massive breakout prospect because of one hot stretch. But finding even a little more impact with the bat changes the conversation.
At the very least, Kilpatrick has put his name back on the map as someone worth keeping an eye on. For a 17th-round pick who appeared to be trending toward organizational depth, that alone deserves some recognition.
Brett Wisely (27)
.278 AVG | .396 OBP | .420 SLG | .816 OPS | 121 wRC+
The old man of this group is one who has actually appeared in 168 career big league games.
Brett Wisely was originally a 15th-round selection by the Tampa Bay Rays in 2019 before being traded to the San Francisco Giants in 2022. He eventually made his MLB debut with San Francisco, but the last few years have turned into quite the journey.
The Giants designated him for assignment in September 2025, when Atlanta claimed him off waivers. He was then traded back to Tampa Bay for cash considerations or a PTBNL, traded back to Atlanta for cash, designated for assignment by the Braves, and ultimately outrighted to Triple-A Gwinnett this season. Got all of that? Good.
Because through all of the roster moves and uncertainty, Wisely has quietly done just about everything he can to make a case for another big league opportunity.
Across 95 games with Gwinnett, Wisely is batting .278 with a .816 OPS and 121 wRC+. His 59 walks lead the Stripers, while his OPS trails only Patrick Clohisy, Brewer Hicklen, Jim Jarvis, and Rowdy Tellez.
At 27, we obviously are not talking about Wisely like a traditional prospect anymore. We know a lot more about what he is than we do with the younger players on this list. But that does not mean his season should go unnoticed.
The most likely outcome is another opportunity to compete for a big league job next Spring Training. Whether that comes with Atlanta or another organization remains to be seen, but his performance in Gwinnett has been more than good enough to warrant another look.
Jordan Groshans (26)
.259 AVG | .329 OBP | .523 SLG | .852 OPS | 119 wRC+
Among Braves minor leaguers with at least 100 plate appearances this season, only three have slugged at least .520: Conor Essenburg, David McCabe, and Jordan Groshans.
Back in 2018, Groshans was selected 12th overall by the Toronto Blue Jays, and plenty of hype followed. From 2020 through 2022, he comfortably found himself on MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 list and was viewed as a potential piece of Toronto’s future.
Baseball, of course, had other plans.
Groshans was traded to the Miami Marlins in 2022, beginning a journey that would eventually take him through a total of five organizations before he landed with Atlanta on a minor league contract.
He has spent the entire 2026 season with Double-A Columbus, and while that is obviously not where anyone expected the former 12th overall pick to be at 26 years old, he has quietly been one of the team’s most consistent offensive performers.
Among Columbus hitters with at least 100 plate appearances, Groshans ranks inside the top five in AVG (.259), SLG (.523), OPS (.852), wOBA (.366), and wRC+ (119).
At this stage of his career, the conversation around Groshans is obviously different than it was four or five years ago. We are no longer wondering whether he can become the cornerstone player Toronto once envisioned. Now it is about whether he can play himself back into a major league opportunity.
Similar to Wisely, there may not be an obvious long-term future for Groshans in Atlanta. But there does not necessarily have to be. He is putting his name back on the radar for organizations looking for depth and giving himself a fighting chance to compete for a roster spot next spring.
Groshans got his first taste of the majors in 2022 after being traded to Miami but has not made it back since. Four years later, the former top prospect still has some juice left in the bat and is doing everything in his power to get another opportunity.