Atlanta's Breakout Prospects for 2024
The Atlanta Braves have seen several prospects jump up the rankings after great seasons, raising the possibility of several of them getting called up next season
The Atlanta Braves have been an organization almost obsessively devoted to pitching recently - from 2019-2023, no MLB team has devoted a larger percentage of their available MLB Draft bonus pool to pitching prospects than the Atlanta Braves, who were the only team to break 60% of all monies paid to arms over that span.
(I haven’t yet updated the calculations to factor in 2024 - that’s an offseason project - but I’m pretty confident that Atlanta will retain the number one spot after glancing at every team’s draft board from this July.)
So it makes sense that some of their best-performing prospects have been pitchers - that’s the strength of the organization. All of the success stories are not arms, however; Atlanta does have some position players performing at a high level.
With Augusta and Rome already done, Mississippi’s season wrapping up this weekend and Gwinnett with only a week left to go, let’s chat a bit about some of these top performers from 2024.
A top-tier backstop
Atlanta has the luxury of two top-tier catching options on the major league roster in Sean Murphy and Travis d’Arnaud.
Catcher Drake Baldwin is pressing the issue.
Baldwin, a 3rd-round pick in 2022 out of Missouri State, moved from Mississippi to Gwinnett in early June and took off once he got out of the Double-A ballpark1, hitting .296/.407/.490 with 12 homers and 53 RBI across 65 games for the Stripers.
A dive under the hood is just as impressive as the surface stats: a 10.8% barrel rate, a 90th percentile EV of 106 mph (around 104 is MLB average), and a zone contact of 87.7%.
That’s a similar EV90 to Philly’s J.T. Realmuto and Houston’s Yainer Diaz, easily plus (60 on the 20-80 scouting scale).
It’s not just all lefty power for Baldwin, however - he’s also walked (48) more than he’s struck out (47) in Gwinnett and is roughly average on defense. Baldwin’s sporting a 26% CS rate from behind the dish and seems to be a capable, if not exceptional, blocker.
(Working with Atlanta catching coach Sal Fasano and starter Sean Murphy, who is one of MLB’s best blockers, is bound to tick him up a bit somewhere between average and above average.)
Baldwin’s 2025 playtime depends on what decision is made with Travis d’Arnaud - the pending free agent has a $8M club option for his age-36 season. If that’s not picked up for whatever reason, I like Baldwin to supplant Chadwick Tromp as the primary backup. There’s also an interesting playing time distribution here: Atlanta could go with Tromp in Atlanta and ride Murphy harder than they have in the last two seasons, letting Baldwin continue to play in Gwinnett every day. I don’t know what else Baldwin has to accomplish in the minors, although returning him to Gwinnett would be a defensible decision given that he just has 65 games of Triple-A experience.
Hackenberg’s worth the money
I was one of many who were a bit surprised that Atlanta not only took Drue Hackenberg out of Virginia Tech with a 2nd-round pick in 2023, but paid him an overslot $2M deal to forgo his remaining college eligiblity. Why was a draft-eligible sophomore with a 4.50 collegiate ERA (including a 5.80 in his final season) worth going overslot for?
Once again, it’s proof that President of Baseball Operations Alex Anthopoulos and scouting director Ronit Shah know more than all of us.
All that the righthander has done is put up is a 3.14 ERA and 10.2 K/9 across three levels of the minors this season, getting better at every level. Starting in High-A Rome, he put up a 3.64 ERA in 12 starts for the Emperors before a 3.13 ERA across nine Mississippi outings and then has allowed just three earned runs across his three Triple-A starts (so far).
Similar to Max Fried and Spencer Schwellenbach from an arsenal perspective, he’s flashed a legitimate FIVE pitch mix for the Stripers so far, supplementing his college sinker and slider with a four-seam fastball, a cutter, and a curveball.
When you dive into who he is as a player, though, the pick makes a lot of sense for Atlanta. Coming from highly athletic bloodlines - both parents were collegiate athletes and his three older siblings were all drafted into professional sports2 - he’s done a good job of repeating his mechanics and getting quick outs. In his three AAA starts, he’s gone six full innings in each, allowing a total of three runs, while throwing less than 100 pitches in each.
Continuing the Fried comparisons, he’s shown the ability to change what he does depending on the opponent - his first start in AAA featured 11 ground ball outs in 19 batters faced through six innings, but he also struck out a MiLB-high sixteen batters in a late July AA start against the Pensacola Blue Wahoos (Marlins affiliate), setting an affiliate record.3 He did that in just 90 pitches (67 strikes), only the second time in the season to date he had been pushed to that pitch count.
I still don’t know what the ceiling is for Hackenberg - is he a better version of Bryce Elder, as a sinker-slider guy that can break out more options and punch tickets when he needs to, or is this a more complete and balanced arsenal that can live as a #3 or #4 starter at the MLB level? His return to Gwinnett next season will help with that determination.
Braun is mighty
Lucas Braun was a lesser-heralded sixth-round pick in 2023 out of Cal State -Northridge as a guy with a 4.19 ERA across four years of college (two at San Diego before transferring to join the Matadors), but as always, follow the money.
Atlanta paid Braun an above-slot $347.5k to sign (on a slot value of $292.7k), and all he’s done in his first full season wearing a Braves uniform is show that $350k might have been a steal for the Braves - Braun’s ten strikeouts in last night’s 7-0 M-Braves victory pushed him to 162 punchies on the season, putting him on a list with Royber Salinas and Ian Anderson as the only three Braves farmhands to reach that total since 2019.
The story here for Braun is both a deep arsenal and the ability to locate all of it - sitting on just a 2.6 BB/9 walk rate this year while throwing four different pitches, he’s struck out 162 batters (10.1 K/9) in his 143.2 innings. He throws a four-seamer, a slider, a curveball and a changeup. During his time in AA, a 13-start sample, it appears that Atlanta’s done their trademark arsenal tweak4 of temporarily minimizing his curveball usage to get him more comfortable with the slider.
The four-seamer’s sitting 92-94 with more horizontal movement than I expected to see, almost 9 inches. It’s the most used pitch, sitting at 40%, but the slider’s close behind at 35% usage and coming in at 82-84 with 6 inches of horizontal break. His curveball sits around 15% usage, getting 13 inches of horizontal break at 77-79, giving Braun three distinct velocity bands for a hitter to navigate. He closes out the arsenal with an 83-85 mph changeup that has over a foot of horizontal movement, so perhaps a touch too little velo spread between the heater and the changeup for my liking but with good enough movement that it more than makes up for it.
The fastball’s very much not a traditional back-spinning fastball with exceptional induced vertical break, so he has to be careful about when he elevates it and he’s always reliant on the horizontal movement to keep it from getting barrelled up.5 But when he’s able to accurately locate it up while dropping the curveball and slider below the zone, he gets good results.
I think the velocity is more of a concern long-term than the movement profile of the pitch, simply because you need one or the other to succeed at the major league level. For an example here, the league as a whole is hitting .319 this season on middle-middle pitches (classified as zone 5 on statcast), but pitches 93 or below (Braun’s average) allow a .346 batting average. Adding even two ticks to that fastball pushes that average down to .290, with it continuing to drop the harder you throw.6
Despite not being on the 40-man roster as we prepare to enter the minor league offseason, I’d imagine that he’s above guys like Allan Winans, Dylan Dodd, and Darius Vines on the hierarchy of guys that Atlanta actually wants to use at the major league level next year.
Burky’s back
Blake Burkhalter was an All-America reliever at nearby Auburn University thanks to his dominant cutter, one he was taught by former Braves starter and then-Auburn pitching coach Tim Hudson.
So it was pretty surprising when he was taken at the end of 2022’s Day One and announced as a starting pitcher.
But despite losing a season after having Tommy John surgery last spring, Burkhalter’s making Atlanta look pretty smart with the decision to have him start. Since returning in early June from rehab and going to High-A Rome, “Burky” is 3-3 with a 2.71 ERA in 14 starts, striking out 63 in his 69.2 innings. And the farther he got from the Tommy John, the better he got: His final seven starts featured a strikeout rate over one per inning with four quality starts, including a career-high eleven punched tickets on August 29th against Greensboro (Pirates organization).
His fastball velo’s improved - he sat 92-93 at Auburn but is most commonly around 94 to 95, touching 97 with the heater. He’s still throwing the cutter in the low-90s as well as a slider in the high-80s, although they blend together too much and it causes problems when they get left up in the zone. (Strangely, neither MLB Pipeline or Baseball America ($) recognize these as different pitches despite the clear separation in velocity and slight differences in movement - Pipeline only discusses the cutter while BA talks about a breaking ball that they classify as a slider that seems to blend between the two)
He has a seldom-used changeup but seems like a good candidate for a splitter, killing the spin to get late break from the fastball tunnel. I’d also look at seeing if he can throw a curveball, giving him something with more horizontal gloveside movement and drop than the cutter while widening the velocity band that opposing hitters have to deal with.
As I reported this morning, Burkhalter’s season is not over - he’s heading to Florida for instructs, which tells me that Atlanta is looking to push both his workloads and catch him up from the missed 2023 season so he can rapidly climb next season.
Mississippi’s Trustmark Park is one of the worst offensive environments in all of baseball when it comes to power production with a HR factor of 54 (100 is neutral); only High-A Tri-City (LA Angels) is worse, at 52.
Christian was a 2026 2nd-round pick as a quarterback by the NFL’s New York Jets, Brandon was a 2021 1st-round pick by Major League Soccer, and Adam was an 18th-round pick in 2021 as a catcher by the Chicago White Sox.
The previous record for a Braves AA pitcher was 14, jointly held by Ian Anderson (June 2019) and Tommy Hanson (June 2008).
One of the most consistent pitching tweaks that Atlanta makes is either giving a pitcher a slider that doesn’t have one (see Grant Holmes) or having a prospect temporarily shelve their curveball to rapidly force improvement on their slider (AJ Smith-Shawver in 2022 vs 2023)
This is actually a similar movement profile on the heater to Spencer Schwellenbach, who gets a below-ideal amount of IVB but cuts it just enough to keep hitters off of it despite the dead-zone shape, because it doesn’t move as much as it looks like it would on the way to the plate.
Fun fact: there’s been 20 middle-middle fastballs thrown at 102 or harder this season and none of them have resulted in a hit. Just throw 102 and your locations don’t matter!
Thank you for this. Do you do a top 30 Braves prospects?