Ken Rosenthal on Braves, Drake Baldwin contract negotiations

If you look around the league through the first month of the season, you’ll see team after team locking in their young stars to long-term contracts before they even finish their rookie campaigns. A strategy the Atlanta Braves really made infamous, beginning with Ronald Acuña Jr. and Ozzie Albies, and continuing with players like Spencer Strider, Michael Harris II, and Austin Riley.

The next obvious candidate in line — and potentially the most deserving of them all outside of Acuña — is Drake Baldwin.

Baldwin is coming off a season in which he hit .274 with 19 homers and an .810 OPS over 124 games on his way to NL Rookie of the Year honors. Superb numbers, especially for a catcher, but it felt like they still sold his offensive ceiling short. The start of the 2026 campaign is far more indicative of what he can be in a full-time role, as he’s hitting .316 with nine homers and a .923 OPS through his first 166 plate appearances.

Baldwin isn’t just one of the best hitting catchers in the sport — he’s one of the best offensive players in the game, ranking in the 94th percentile or better in xwOBA, xBA, and xSLG. His Statcast page is a sea of red, but you don’t need advanced metrics to understand what kind of hitter he is.

The eye test tells you everything.

With barely a full season under his belt, Baldwin already has one of the most advanced approaches on the entire roster. He doesn’t strike out much, and he’s a nightmare with two strikes, posting an .811 OPS in those situations this season. He has power to all fields and is willing to take whatever the pitcher gives him. There’s nothing about what he’s doing that feels fluky — if anything, it feels like he’s just scratching the surface.

So, of course the Braves should be looking to extend him, right?

Not according to Ken Rosenthal — at least not yet.

“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.”

You can understand why the Braves might have some hesitation following the Murphy trade and subsequent extension.

Murphy has had exactly one good half-season since coming to Atlanta, earning an All-Star nod in 2023. Since then, it’s been a string of injuries and underwhelming production, nowhere close to the player he was in Oakland — when he was arguably the best defensive catcher in baseball while consistently posting an OPS north of .800.

Now, the Braves owe him $45 million through 2028, and unless he turns things around, that’s a contract they’re likely stuck carrying.

But Murphy isn’t the only deal that might give the front office pause.

Strider looked like a future Cy Young winner when he signed his extension, and now there are questions about his future due to a litany of injuries. Riley hasn’t consistently matched the expectations that come with being the highest-paid player in franchise history, and even Michael Harris II has had his share of ups and downs as well.

Extending young players has never been a foolproof strategy. There’s a reason players are willing to sign those deals early — if everything were guaranteed, they’d all bet on themselves and become free agents as soon as possible.

The Braves’ recent track record makes it understandable that they’d be a little more cautious this time around. But if Baldwin keeps producing like this, caution eventually turns into hesitation… and hesitation turns into a much more expensive decision.

At some point, they’re going to have to decide whether they trust what they’re seeing, or risk watching another cornerstone price himself out of their comfort zone.

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