Monday will be a big day for Drake Baldwin and the Braves, as the young catcher looks to take home a huge personal prize in the NL Rookie of the Year award and also net the team an additional first-round pick in the 2026 draft. This also has implications later in the offseason, as the team would lose the second-highest pick in the draft if they signed a free agent who turned down a qualifying offer. I’ve heard some argue that getting this extra pick from Baldwin winning Rookie of the Year would make it easier to take that loss of a pick when signing a big free agent, but I would make the counterargument that this makes the cost higher, in that the team would then lose a higher pick with almost $3.5 million in closing value, as opposed to their second-round pick, which will likely have a closing value on the order of $2 million. Especially considering how this front office likes to spread money around in the draft, that’s a significant cost to signing a free agent to a Qualifying Offer, especially with the extra pick from Baldwin’s potential NL ROY. The 2026 draft offers this franchise the opportunity to get a huge injection of young talent into the farm system with a front office that drafts well and potentially a historically large bonus pool if they get the pick of Baldwin’s NL ROY and some lottery luck.
Personally, I’d be pretty protective of that draft pick and there really aren’t many free agents I’d be willing to lose that pick for (especially if it’s the Baldwin NL ROY pick). It would have to be Kyle Tucker or maybe Dylan Cease if I personally wanted to give up on signing them, especially knowing that this franchise is performing quite well under Anthopoulos. Personally, I think a fairly realistic and resource-efficient offseason would start with re-signing Ha-Seong Kim to something on the order of a two- to three-year deal with an AAV of around $15 million. I would then pursue a starting pitcher who would be a potential playoff-quality starter with a durable history and who wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg in draft or prospect capital – Sonny Gray seems like a really good fit here, but free agents Chris Bassitt, Zach Eflin and trade targets Joe Ryan, MacKenzie Gore, Mitch Keller, Pablo Lopez, Freddy Peralta and Brady Singer all come to mind as options on a spectrum of cost and quality. Those are the two biggest needs, but the team clearly needs to add a few pieces to the bullpen as well (Pete Fairbanks would be a nice addition), and I’d like to see the addition of a utility player who can provide a league-average bat off the bench. I think this would be a promising offseason to set the team up for success in 2026 without costing the team too much in terms of assets moving forward.
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