Alex Anthopoulos on a Drake Baldwin contract extension

One of the headlines of the week came from Ken Rosenthal, who reported for The Athletic that, despite Drake Baldwin‘s red-hot start to his Braves career, there have yet to be any talks about an early contract extension.

“The Braves, however, have yet to seriously engage Baldwin in discussions on an extension, according to people briefed on the matter,” Rosenthal reports for The Athletic. “Their hesitance almost certainly stems from the reason catchers rarely get big money — the wear and tear of the position, even with days at designated hitter offering occasional relief.

“The last catcher the Braves extended, Sean Murphy at $73 million over six years, provided $39.6 million of value in his first year with the club according to FanGraphs’ dollars metric, which is WAR converted to a dollar scale based on what a player would earn in free agency. But injuries cost Murphy nearly half his team’s games the past two seasons and the first 35 of this one.”

Look around the league and you’ll see team after team locking up young stars long before they ever sniff free agency. It’s a strategy the Atlanta Braves  helped popularize, beginning with the deals handed out to Ronald Acuña Jr. and Ozzie Albies, then continuing with Spencer Strider, Austin Riley, Michael Harris II, and others.

Drake Baldwin absolutely feels like the next guy that belongs in that category.

Position aside, Baldwin is one of the best pure hitting prospects this organization has produced in a very long time — a legitimate threat to hit .300 with 30 home runs annually, which is becoming increasingly rare in today’s game.

There’s obviously some truth to the concerns surrounding long-term deals for catchers. The wear and tear of the position is real, and history is littered with examples of those contracts aging poorly. But the Braves wouldn’t be signing Baldwin through his mid-to-late 30s. More realistically, they’d simply be buying out his arbitration years and adding a couple of extra seasons on the back end.

That’s a very different type of gamble.

There should be very little doubt this eventually gets done, and while Alex Anthopoulos understandably avoided making any sort of commitment publicly, he did address the situation during a recent interview with 680 The Fan.