Why the Braves Can Afford to Trade Top Prospects

The hardest part of trading for a superstar isn't giving up prospects. It's knowing which ones not to trade.

“Holy overpay”

Every July, it happens.

An impact player gets traded, the prospect package gets announced, and within about thirty seconds the internet has declared a winner. The team that got the established star “fleeced” the other club, or the team getting the prospects “robbed” the contender.

It's become one of my least favorite traditions of trade deadline season, because it’s dumb. Here’s the uncomfortable reality:

We have no idea. Not yet, anyway.

Prospects aren’t finished products. They’re merely educated guesses, and history suggests that those guesses miss far more often than fans realize.

That’s why Alex Anthopoulos recently said there is essentially one prospect in the organization he’d have a difficult time trading.

One.

He didn’t identify the player, but it’s not hard to make an educated guess that it’s outfielder Eric Hartman, who has blossomed into a top 25 player in most reputable prospect lists.

Everyone else?

If the right deal is on the table, they’re probably available.

And if that deal brings Tarik Skubal to Atlanta, history suggests Braves fans shouldn’t be nearly as afraid of that prospect package as they think.

Let’s talk about it.

Let’s look at the historical comparisons

Despite his main role covering the Mets, Tim Britton has become one of my favorite writers at The Athletic behind only pitching nerd Eno Sarris and friend of Braves Today Jesús Cano, Atlanta’s new beat writer.

That love for Britton stems from his research-filled articles about transactions, like the one he dropped on Thursday morning about recent historical comps for several of MLB’s biggest trade chips this winter.

It’s a great reminder of two things about trades, which we’ll break down in order.

The first is this:

The team getting the established star usually gets the player they were actually buying.

That’s because established major leaguers have already answered the hardest question in baseball.

Can they do it in the big leagues?

Prospects haven’t.

Britton goes through some recent trades to suss out the precedents for currently available players, and it’s a great reminder that more often than not, the team acquiring the MLB piece ends up being the “winner” in the long run.

Let’s look at Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal. He’s by far the most accomplished pitcher that might be moved at the deadline, having won the last two Cy Young awards in the American League.

There’s a precedent here, with Max Scherzer being traded from the Nationals to the Dodgers in 2021 for a four-player package. While the exact return can’t be used to set a baseline for a Skubal deal, as shortstop Trea Turner was moved in the deal along with Scherzer and, unlike Mad Max, had one additional year of team control, the final pieces of the deal ended up almost universally not living up to the hype.

Washington received LA’s #1 and #2 rated prospects in starter Josiah Gray and catcher Keibert Ruiz as headliners of the package. The duo hasn’t lived up to the billing, with Ruiz sporting a .252/.295/.380 line across six seasons in Washington and Gray both giving the Nationals a 4.80 ERA across his first 378.2 MLB innings and missing the last two seasons after Tommy John surgery followed by a flexor strain. Of the other two minor leaguers in the package, outfielder Donovan Casey never debuted for the Nationals and spent last season in Mexico, while starter Gerardo Carrillo debuted just this season as a reliever for the Diamondbacks at the age of 27.

No, the better comparison is probably the Detroit Tigers sending David Price to Alex Anthopoulos’ Toronto Blue Jays in 2016, a deal that required Toronto to give up three players: Top 25-prospect Daniel Norris, just-debuted MLB starter Matthew Boyd, and lefty reliever Jairo Labourt.

Boyd’s still in the majors as a starter, rocking a 4.15 ERA for the Chicago Cubs this year, but Norris pitched to a 4.52 ERA for Detroit and was moved to the bullpen after the 2019 season and Labourt was out of baseball after 2017.

An equivalent package today for Skubal, without accounting for inflation or the competitiveness of the market, would be a top 25 or 50 prospect, a near-majors starter, and a lower-level relief prospect.

Consulting the newly updated Braves Prospect Composite (more on that at the bottom of the article), an equivalent deal for Atlanta likely works out like this:

Top 25-50 prospect = Eric Hartman or Cam Caminiti
Near-majors starter = JR Ritchie or Owen Murphy
Lower-level relief prospect = Hayden Harris, Blake Burkhalter, or Rolddy Muñoz

That hurts, and it should.

But here’s where point #2 comes in:

The Braves have earned the benefit of the doubt when evaluating their own prospects.

Does it hurt to lose names like Hartman or Caminiti, both of who look like they could be stars at the major league level? It does.

But at the same time, losing that caliber of prospect isn’t something that we’ve ever had to worry about under Alex Anthopoulos.

They’ve nailed the evaluations

Quick, think over the last six years and tell me which prospect Atlanta’s traded that, in retrospect, they would have been better keeping?

There aren’t many.

For me, it’s Caleb Durbin. A speculative 14th-round pick in 2021, Atlanta flipped him the next winter to the Yankees for lefty reliever Lucas Luetge. That deal proved to be a poor decision, as Luetge had a 7.24 ERA for Atlanta in 2023 and was DFA’d, getting a few minor league deals after that but ultimately retiring from baseball the next season.

Durbin, meanwhile, was flipped as part of a package to the Brewers the next winter, who got a ROY-3 season out of him and then flipped him to the Red Sox for current starter Kyle Harrison and infielder David Hamilton, among other pieces.¹

Other than that, which prospects did Atlanta deal that you regret losing? Shea Langeliers has been good for the Athletics, but you got Matt Olson out of that deal so it’s not like it was a complete zero. None of the pitchers in that or the Sean Murphy deal² ended up being impactful in the majors, and neither did outfielders Cristian Pache (to the A’s) or Drew Waters (to the Royals).

But the players the Braves have kept, by declining certain deals, ended up being mostly good decisions.

Piecing together reports from the last few years, we know that teams asked about Michael Harris II and Spencer Strider back in 2022, as well as pitchers AJ Smith-Shawver and Spencer Schwellenbach in 2024 and Drake Baldwin ahead of his ROTY season in 2025.

Some of those players had already debuted, and despite their relatively short track records in the majors at the time, MLB teams saw them as the established star they wanted to buy.

The Alex Anthopoulos-led Braves have done a remarkable job of knowing which prospects to trade and which prospects to keep.

A somewhat common joke among prospect enthusiasts a few years ago was that if the Tampa Bay Rays called to ask for one of your hitters or the Atlanta Braves called to offer one of their pitchers, hang up the phone and go find out what they knew that you didn’t.

Which brings us back to Skubal.

Will losing Caminiti or Hartman hurt when the deal’s announced? It will, of course. But over time, this front office has shown it understands the potential ceiling of each prospect they’ve included in deals, as well as the likelihood of them hitting that ceiling. They’ve been willing to move guys like Jared Shuster and Ryan Cusick and Joey Estes, but not your Smith-Shawver, Strider, or Schwellenbach.

Let’s hope that both the willingness to make a deal and the restraint in moving future stars manifest this trade deadline. If Tarik Skubal does defy all odds to become a Brave, the first reaction online will almost certainly be that Atlanta gave up too much.

History suggests that probably won’t be the last word.

About the Braves Prospect Composite:

Everybody has biases, and in baseball, they often manifest in prospect lists.

Some evaluators prioritize upside, while others value proximity to the majors or data or 90th percentile outcomes. And none of those approaches are wrong, per se, they’re just answering slightly different questions.

The Braves Prospect Composite combines those viewpoints into a single consensus ranking.

I’ve aggregated rankings from multiple respected national and Braves-specific prospect evaluators, then averaged the results to produce one list. Prospects who appear on more lists receive more confidence, while differences between outlets and weightings for how old the list is naturally balance each other out.

Braves Today will be adding our own rankings to this soon, as well.

The goal isn’t to replace individual rankings, it’s to provide a better starting point for the conversations we want to have here at Braves Today.

Throughout the year, I’ll update the Composite as new rankings are released, players graduate to the major leagues, are traded, or see their stock rise and fall. It also serves as a useful translation tool during trade season, helping estimate how Atlanta’s farm system compares to historical prospect packages in previous blockbuster deals.

Premium subscribers can view the latest Braves Prospect Composite below.

1. Seriously, Boston’s been so bad at trades, dating back to the Mookie deal.

2. Yes, losing William Contreras was a big blow, but I did say “prospects”