What will Drake Baldwin produce in 2026?

When I was seriously updating IWAG, one of the flags or parameters I entered was essentially a confidence assessment – ​​not just of the point estimate, but of the distribution. Not surprisingly, my work and research has shown that it is a lot easier to predict the upcoming season of a player with at least a handful of MLB seasons under his belt. Younger players, or rather, less experienced players posed a relative challenge. Trying to predict a rookie incoming was a nightmare, but second-year players weren’t much better. (I recall a study a while ago by Tom Tango or Mitchel Lichtman, or perhaps both, that found that assuming a league average for a given rookie rookie was ultimately less wrong than trying to use their minor league stats and other parameters to actually predict their performance.)

Unfortunately for me, and for you if you’re into prediction, 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 the question is whether he will maintain that hardware-and-Prospect Promotion Incentive-winning performance, improve it, or regress for some reason.

Career to date, status and recent achievements

Baldwin was drafted in the third round of the 2022 MLB Draft, spent most of his first full professional season in High-A, and moved up to Triple-A on a full-time basis in mid-2024 after fewer than 300 PAs in Double-A. The Braves have historically promoted guys they expected to be key players without having to pay their dues or keep up their stats in Triple-A, but Baldwin wasn’t earmarked for a big-league role until Sean Murphy was injured in Spring Training 2025. Considering Baldwin spent much of 2024 destroying Triple-A pitching, their hand was essentially forced — which, as you can see from the way 2025 happened, is not always a bad hand. 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 percentages thanks to the positional adjustment for donning the tools of ignorance (about 1.3 WAR/600 alone) and playing decent defense, but Baldwin DHed quite a bit and was below average defensively, so his offense was about three times as valuable as his defense in terms of above-average performance.

That offense was revelatory, in part because Baldwin, with seemingly little effort, looked like a paragon of what the 2025 Braves hoped to sculpt from their hitters: He ran at an average speed, struck out far less than average and made a ton of contact while maintaining an above-average appearance at that contact. While many Braves hitters had long swings that they hit through the zone, essentially using delta vee to their advantage when connecting, Baldwin kept the bat speed aspect but relied on a shorter swing that seemed to have little detrimental effect on his power production while allowing him to reduce swing-and-miss. He destroyed four-seamers (.419 xwOBA) and had no trouble against sliders (.365) – in a somewhat crazy development, he posted a .370 xwOBA against sliders when he lacked the pack advantage. His problem was the changeups, but that’s not surprising considering he’s a lefty hitter.

He was also pretty consistent, or at least consistently valuable. His worst monthly xwOBA was .321, when he was down a bit in September. He had a great month, with an xwOBA of almost .400 in May, but had three others where he was firmly at .350 or higher. Defensively, it was more of a mixed bag: He has great mechanics when it comes to positioning himself to block and throw, but he lacked pizzazz on his throws. In terms of framing, he really struggled to be convincing when he had to reach for the ball – above the zone or, more importantly, across his body. It’s something that can probably be repaired mechanically, although I’m not exactly sure the Braves are equipped to do so, given the whole William Contreras thing.

So, how do you take this and push it to 2026? It is tempting to just say that the status quo will prevail. It gives Baldwin credit for his offensive performance, prevents any uptick defensively, and eliminates any headache you might get from trying to figure out how much Baldwin will or won’t DH by simply equating it to the same rate of catcher-versus-DH analysis in 2025. Adjustments after using 2025 as a starting point can be easily kept in view… or not.

For a projection system, I think things go back to my first paragraph here: How much do you regress to the average, given how good Baldwin was in 2025? Something is probably warranted, and there’s a major issue that’s difficult to implement effectively regarding the massive change in positional adjustment between catcher and DH, the two positions Baldwin will likely play heavily in 2026. IWAG’s best effort is below, and it’s not exactly encouraging…

As you can see, IWAG has registered some offensively regress to the mean. But a similarly big hit came from what looked like a 2-on-1 split between catcher and DH – which Real different than in 2025. Last year Baldwin had just 52 PAs as a DH, less than one in eight if you ignore his pinch-hitting performances. Unless Sean Murphy ends up becoming a non-entity, 2ish-to-1ish is punishing Baldwin on a value basis this year, but it’s hard to think he’ll get over 500 PAs without such a slump.

As far as distributions go, this is a nice one, which is another way of saying, “Yeah, IWAG has no idea.” There just isn’t that much that would limit the range, and the catcher-versus-DH thing causes a lot of issues that require pontificating about Sean Murphy’s health and whether another player will settle at DH, which IWAG can’t actually do in a projection for Drake Baldwin.

Okay, I’ve given you the information. Well, some information. You may have your own data. I hereby ask you: