Alex Anthopoulos has turned the contract extension into one of baseball’s better magic tricks.
First comes the young player Atlanta identifies as part of its core. Then comes the silence. No rumors, no public bargaining and rarely even an acknowledgment that negotiations have begun. Finally, the “blue box” press release appears, announcing a long-term agreement almost nobody knew was being discussed.
So when BravesVision’s Paul Byrd asked Anthopoulos about the possibility of signing Drake Baldwin to an extension on sunday, the Braves’ president of baseball operations did not make another contract appear. He did, however, show his hand.
“We clearly love Drake,” Anthopoulos said. “I’ve said no to including him in trades a ton in the past.”
Anthopoulos declined to discuss the “when, if, how” of any potential negotiations, reminding reporters that secrecy is intentional. Nobody had “any even a sense we were having conversations” before the Braves’ previous extensions were announced.
Then he provided what sounded suspiciously like Atlanta’s entire checklist.
“Someone that qualifies early in his service, All-Star, premium position, all that kind of stuff, just great human being—he checks all the boxes of someone you’d want to have conversations with.”
None of that confirms that negotiations have begun. With Anthopoulos, confirmation probably will not arrive until a contract does.
But Atlanta has already answered the easiest question: The Braves consider Baldwin a core player whom they want to keep long term. The more interesting question is how much it would cost to make that happen, given that there’s remarkably little precedent for Baldwin’s potential extension.
Let’s talk about it.
“He checks all the boxes”
Baldwin fulfills Anthopoulos’ criteria almost literally.
Baldwin’s still early in his career, young enough that there’s both some continued projection and development remaining, while also not yet burdened by the wear and tear of years of catching. He’s reached the All-Star Game in just in his second majr league season, and excelled at a premium position where merely competent offense is a differentiator. As evidenced by how often Atlanta chose to use him at designated hitter just to keep his bat in the lineup, he’s a core member of the roster and offense, one who bats in the top half of the order on a nightly basis.
Oh, and he’s an asset in the clubhouse, with ace Chris Sale taking every opportunity to praise Baldwin’s composure and maturity at just 25.
Atlanta evidently had some idea this was possible, with Anthopoulos refusing to include him in trade talks going all the way back to the pursuit of then-White-Sox lefty Garrett Crochet. The flamethrower was traded to the Red Sox the winter before Baldwin debuted in the majors, with the package including an arm (Wikelman González) and three high-ceiling position players, including outfielder Braden Montgomery and, yes, a catcher: Kyle Teel, Boston’s first-round pick in 2023.
But the hard part of the proposed deal is this: The Braves do not need an extension to keep Baldwin. An extension would be Atlanta placing a bet on what he becomes before the remainder of the league-controlled process establishes his full price.
Why the timing matters
Baldwin’s played the first two seasons of his career making the league minimum, although his Rookie of the Year win in 2025 netted him a $750,000 bonus from the league’s pre-arbitration bonus pool plus an additional $425,583 in WAR-based compensation.
His minimum salaries were just $760,000 last year and $800,000 this year. Including his $633,300 draft bonus, two major-league salaries and pre-arbitration bonus-pool payouts, Baldwin has earned just shy of $3.4 million in his career.
He’ll be on a league-minimum salary in 2027, as well, although that exact figure won’t be known until the new CBA is agreed to sometime next spring.
After that, his three years of arbitration have some useful comps, and both of them should be familiar to Braves fans: Shea Langeliers and William Contreras.
Langeliers just settled with the Athletics for a $5.25M salary in his first of three arbitration years, while Contreras has gotten paid $6.1M and $9.4M in his first two arbitration salaries. Assuming a slight bump for inflation, that’s probably about $30M in arbitration over Baldwin’s three arb years.
What the catcher market says
This is where it gets tricky: There are very few extension comps that make sense, as most extensions for similar catchers have come either much earlier in team control or after significantly different circumstances.
The only two catchers in the last decade that signed with two years of service time or less are Keibert Ruiz (Washington) and Samuel Basallo (Baltimore). Ruiz got $50M over eight years when signing on a similar timeframe to Baldwin, but he also had a career line of .255/.315/.373 and just 11 home runs in 143 games at the time of the deal.
The Basallo deal, 8/$67M, came just days after his debut at the age of 21. Even less helpful when trying to price a Baldwin extension.
If you expand up to other catchers with more service time, Cal Raleigh’s March 2025 extension may provide the most help here. Signed with three years of service time, it overrode his $5.6M salary in the first of three arbitration years, guaranteeing him $105M over six years with an additional vesting option. (He also got a $10M signing bonus, but since the Braves don’t do that, we’re ignoring it other than noting its impact on his total guarantee.)
The pricing valued his three arbitration years at $29M and bought out three free-agent years at $24.67M each, sending him back to free agency at 34 if the option doesn’t vest.
Baldwin has accomplished far more than Ruiz or Basallo had when they signed, but he remains one year behind where Raleigh was in the service-time process. That places his likely guarantee somewhere between those contracts, which is how we arrive at the $75 million-to-$85 million range.
The hard part here is that most early-career extensions go to shortstops and centerfielders, not catchers. There’s just not a lot of data points here to go off of, and every negotiation builds on prior precedent.
What a Baldwin deal could look like
That’s not going to stop me from trying, though.
Assuming the current arbitration and free-agent structure remains intact under a new CBA, an extension would cover one pre-arbitration season, three arbitration seasons, and however many free-agent years Atlanta can convince Baldwin to surrender.
Michael Harris II’s eight-year, $72M deal he signed in his first year bought out three free-agent years, while Spencer Strider’s 6/$75M deal bought out just one. Let’s split the difference and assume that it’s two years of free agency that Atlanta’s buying out here, which would take Baldwin through age 31.
I’m going with six years and $75M on the deal, with the following structure:
2027 (pre-arb): $2M
2028 (ARB 1): $6M
2029 (ARB 2): $10M
2030 (ARB 3): $14M
2031 (FA 1): $21M
2032 (FA 2): $22M
I’d also attach a club option on the back end, something that’s worth Baldwin’s while and also has a buyout that’s large enough to show the player (and agent) that Atlanta’s incentivized to pick it up. Strider’s is $22M with a $5M buyout, while Harris has two options of $15M and $20M, each holding a $5M buyout.
Let’s do a $22M club option with a $7M buyout for 2033, Baldwin’s age-32 season, bringing it to $82M in total guarantees if the option’s declined and $97M if it’s picked up.
The Sean Murphy question
The problem here is that Atlanta’s already carrying a large dollar contract at catcher, with Sean Murphy two-thirds of the way through a $73M extension he signed after being traded to Atlanta in December of 2022.
My proposed structure works out in Atlanta’s favor, though - Murphy is making $15M in each of the next two seasons, while Baldwin would be making $2M and $6M. A total investment of $17M and $21M to cover catcher and potentially a lot of the designated hitter at-bats isn’t an onerous amount to carry on the books, and Baldwin’s salary doesn’t meaningfully escalate until Murphy’s $15M is cleared from the roster. Even if Murphy does rebound enough to warrant picking up his $15M club option for 2029, his age-34 season, that’s still just $25M total committed to the position and if Murphy’s hitting well enough to be back on the roster under the option, the Braves will be using him and Baldwin together at catcher and DH on most days.
Obviously, the Braves could always decide to clear Murphy’s money via trade and use some of it to sign a pure backup for Baldwin, although Murphy likely needs to rebound a bit at the plate for that to happen without the Braves attaching a positive asset to clear his remaining $30M.
Why Baldwin might sign, and why he might wait
Whenever the question of why a young player would want to sign an early-career extension, which almost always requires forgoing the potential of more money in free agency, is asked, the immediate answer has to discuss the generational security.
MLB contracts are fully guaranteed, and that’s not something likely to change in the upcoming CBA. Barring some sort of suspension, Baldwin would lock in $75M in future earnings while preserving the ability to go to free agency in his early 30s and cash in again.
(Or, if he finds a club as desperate as Philadelphia was with J.T. Realmuto, maybe he could cash in two or three more times.)
That guarantee is particularly important at the defensive position with the most wear-and-tear; catching is a physically demanding position, with several prominent players choosing to either walk away early (Buster Posey) or change positions (Joe Mauer) due to the physical strain of catching five games a week.
While it’s a minor factor in relation to the other two, an extension would also eliminate the inherent year-to-year uncertainty of the arbitration process, which can often become adversarial between the teams and the players.
At the same time, it’s not a slam dunk for Baldwin to sign an extension this winter. Prior to his May oblique injury, Baldwin was raking: a .303/.389/.543 line with 13 homers in just 48 games. He was on a 162-game pace for a 44-homer, 128 RBI campaign.
Think about the Cal Raleigh example from earlier - he signed his extension before his 60-homer, 125 RBI season that saw him finish as the runner-up for AL MVP. Imagine how much more he would have gotten last winter had he waited one more season to sign his extension with Seattle?
And if Baldwin were to surpass my arbitration projections, perhaps clearing $35M or $40M during those three seasons, his performance would likely warrant a massive deal in free agency. J.T. Realmuto reached free agency at the age of 30, coming off three straight seasons with an OPS in the low-800s, and got $115.5M over five years with Philly ($23.1M AAV)…and that was five years ago. Similar production for Baldwin - he had a .932 OPS prior to the injury this year - would likely allow Baldwin to establish a new AAV record for a catcher.
Why Atlanta should act now
At the end of the day, Atlanta’s spent two seasons in the last five going through the catcher wilderness - they used seven catchers in 2021, followed by eight this season. Just finding competent catchers can be a challenge for teams at times, nevermind a premium offensive one.
Atlanta already knows the player and the person, and he’s worthy of the investment from a clubhouse perspective. They clearly agree on his fit with the club, because they repeatedly refused to include him in potential trades, dating back to before he debuted with Atlanta.
And it’s true that there’s a bit of unknown and risk here, but there always will be. Waiting for absolute certainty on who the player is and where his ceiling ends up defeats the purpose of doing the extension early - you’ll end up paying market prices.
It’s abundantly clear that not only is Drake Baldwin one of the team’s best hitters already, he’s potentially one of the best in all of baseball. And Atlanta should purchase that peak before the rest of the league gets a chance to bid on how high it might end up.
Anthopoulos will not tell us whether the Braves are negotiating with Baldwin, but his answer explained why they should be.
If the next update arrives as a blue box, it will only be surprising in the way Anthopoulos prefers: Nobody saw the negotiations, but he showed everyone exactly why the deal made sense.