Prior entries:
Back when I was updating IWAG in earnest, one of the flags or parameters that I put in was essentially a confidence rating — not just of the point estimate, but the distribution. Not surprisingly, my work and research indicated that it is a lot easier to forecast the upcoming season of a player with at least a handful of MLB seasons under their belts. Younger players, or more accurately, less experienced players, posed a relative challenge. Trying to forecast a to-debut rookie was a nightmare, but second-year players weren’t much better. (I remember a study a while ago by either Tom Tango or Mitchel Lichtman, or maybe both of them, that indicated that assuming league average for a given to-debut rookie ended up less wrong than trying to use their minor league stats and other parameters to actually forecast their performance.)
Unfortunately for me, and for you, if you care about forecasting, Drake Baldwin is a second-year player. His rookie year was great, one of the few things that actually worked in the Braves’ favor in 2025, and now there’s a question of whether he’ll maintain that hardware-and-Prospect Promotion Incentive-winning performance, improve upon it, or backslide for whatever reason.
Career-to-date, status, and recent performance
Baldwin was drafted in the third round of the 2022 MLB Draft, spent the bulk of his first full professional season in High-A, and moved up to Triple-A on a full-time basis midway through 2024, after fewer than 300 PAs in Double-A. The Braves have, historically, promoted guys they expected to be key performers without needing them to pay their dues or pad their stats in Triple-A, but Baldwin wasn’t earmarked for a big league role until Sean Murphy got hurt in Spring Training 2025. Given that Baldwin spent much of 2024 destroying Triple-A pitching, their hand was basically forced — which, as you can tell from how 2025 played out, is not always a bad thing.
Baldwin finished 2025 with 3.1 fWAR in 446 PAs, a pretty sexy WAR-per-600-PAs rate of about 4.2. Catchers can achieve high WAR/600 rates by virtue of the positional adjustment for donning the tools of ignorance (about 1.3 WAR/600 alone) and playing decent defense, but Baldwin DHed a fair bit and was below-average defensively, such that his offense was about three times as valuable as his defense in terms of performance above average.
That offense was revelatory, in part because Baldwin, with seemingly little effort, resembled a paragon of what the 2025 Braves were hoping to sculpt of their hitters: he walked at an average rate, struck out way less than average, and made a ton of contact while maintaining above-average oomph on said contact. While many Braves hitters had long swings that they whipped through the zone, basically leveraging delta-vee to their benefit when connecting, Baldwin kept the bat speed aspect but relied on a shorter swing that seemed to have few ill effects on his power production while allowing him to mitigate swing-and-miss. He obliterated four-seamers (.419 xwOBA) and had no issues with sliders (.365) — in a somewhat-crazy development, he managed a .370 xwOBA against sliders when lacking the platoon advantage. His issue was changeups, but which is not surprising given that he’s a lefty-batting rookie.
He was also pretty consistent, or at least, consistently valuable. His worst monthly xwOBA was .321, when he wore down a bit in September. He had one really great month, with a near-.400 xwOBA in May, but had three others where he was solidly at .350 or above. Defensively, it was more of a mixed bag: he has great mechanics in terms of positioning himself to block and throw, but lacked zip on his throws. In terms of framing, he really struggled to be convincing when he had to reach for the ball — either above the zone or, more critically, across his body. It’s the sort of thing that can probably be fixed mechanically, though I’m not exactly sure whether the Braves are equipped to do that well given the whole William Contreras thing.
Forecasting
So, how do you take this and shove it into 2026? It’s tempting to just say the status quo will prevail — it gives Baldwin the credit for his offensive performance, prevents assuming any uptick defensively, and precludes any headache that one could get from trying to figure out how much Baldwin will or not will be DHing by simply setting it equal to the same rate of catcher-versus-DH breakdown in 2025. Adjustments after using 2025 as a starting point might be easy to eyeball… or not.
For a projection system, well, I think things go back to my first paragraph here: how much do you regress to the mean given how good Baldwin was in 2025? Something is probably warranted, and there’s a big issue that is hard to implement effectively regarding the huge swing in positional adjustment between catcher and DH, which are the two positions that Baldwin will likely play heavily in 2026. IWAG’s best attempt is below, and it’s not really that heartening…
As you can see, IWAG applied some regression to the mean offensively. But, a similarly chunky hit came from something akin to a 2-to-1 split between catcher and DH — which is really different from 2025. Last year, Baldwin only had 52 PAs as a DH, less than one-in-eight if you ignore his pinch-hitting appearances. This year, unless Sean Murphy ends up being a non-entity, 2ish-to-1ish is punishing for Baldwin on a value basis, but it’s hard to assume he’ll hit 500-plus PAs without a breakdown like that.
As far as distributions go, this is a fun one, which is another way of saying, “yeah, IWAG has no idea.” There just isn’t too much to go off of that would cabin the range, and the catcher-versus-DH thing causes a lot of issues that requires pontificating on Sean Murphy’s health and whether any other player gets ensconced at DH, neither of which IWAG is actually capable of doing in a projection for Drake Baldwin.
Your turn
Alright, I’ve given you the info. Well, some info. You may have your own info. With that, I ask you:
- Rounded to the nearest fWAR, how much will Drake Baldwin produce in 2026?
- How confident are you in your choice? Go with a scale from 1-5, where 3 is “I dunno, reasonably confident,” 5 is certain, and 1 is “I am participating but have no confidence in my choice and don’t want the fact that it will likely be incorrect to affect my place in any theoretical standings all that much.”
- Guys, seriously, stop picking numbers that aren’t a whole WAR, though if you do, it’s not like you’ll remember my forced adjustment to it when I score these next autumn anyway.
