Based on some comments from the last thread, I started looking at the Braves’ draft history. As I recalled, it was pretty rough for a while, so I sort of arbitrarily chose to look at the two decades between 1994 and 2014, before the bonanza draft in 2015 that landed Austin Riley, Mike Soroka, and Kolby Allard all in the first round.

Because the Braves won every year, they typically drafted at the very back of the first round, and this helps to explain why they didn’t net as many blue chips. But it still isn’t a particularly impressive record.

First Round

The Braves had 30 first-round draftees between 1994 and 2014, thanks to a number of supplemental round picks that they received when players left for free agency. Seventeen made the majors, 59%.

Of them, just 11 of them posted more than 0 WAR in the majors. Six posted negative WAR, and the other 12 never made the Show.

(One draftee, Chad Hutchinson, chose not to sign, and instead went to Stanford, and then got drafted in the second round three years later. After an undistinguished pro baseball career, he played a few years in the NFL.)

It’s worth noting that several of the prospects who failed to develop in the majors nevertheless were valuable trade pieces for the Braves, like Dan Meyer.

  • Two of them had highly successful careers of more than 40 WAR: Jason Heyward and Adam Wainwright.
  • Two of them had fairly successful careers, with more than 10 WAR: Mike Minor and Kelly Johnson.
  • Three of them were reasonably useful for a while: Jason Marquis, Jeff Francoeur, and Jarrod Saltalamacchia.
  • Four of them were relievers who were okay for a bit: Lucas Sims, Joey Devine, Sean Gilmartin, and Cory Rasmus.

Second Round

Interestingly, the Braves may have had a better record in the second round, though their 31 selections netted only 27 picks as four of them failed to sign, including draftees in back-to-back years from 2001-2002. Fourteen made the majors, 52%.

Still, while a lower percentage made the majors, a higher percentage achieved stardom.

  • One is a potential Hall of Famer: Freddie Freeman.
  • Two of them had very sucessful careers of more than 30 WAR: Brian McCann and Andrelton Simmons.
  • One of them had a very successful career despite a quick decline and off-field issues, with more than 25 WAR: Yunel Escobar.
  • Two of them had fairly successful careers, with more than 10 WAR: Alex Wood and Nick Ahmed.
  • Two were reasonably useful for a while: middle reliever Matt Belisle (7.3 WAR), who has more career rWAR than Francoeur, Marquis, and Saltalamacchia; and backup catcher Victor Caratini, who has more career rWAR (3.4) than Sims, Devine, Gilmartin, and Rasmus.

Third Round

The Braves only had 22 picks in 21 seasons’ worth of third rounds, and they all signed. Twelve made the majors, 55%. Two were stars: Craig Kimbrel and Charlie Morton. Matt Harrison was quite effective for a while, and Ryan Langerhans and David Hale were okay for a bit.

The Awful Truth

I’ve buried the lede here. All of the most successful draftees in this period were drafted in the 2000s. The single best draftee taken in the first three rounds from 1994 to 1999 was Matt Belisle, who was a very good reliever for a long time. But, a reliever worth 7 total wins above replacement is just not a very impressive name to have at the top of the list.

Moreover, he never even suited up for the team that drafted him over his 15-year career, as we traded him from Triple-A as a PTBNL in the deal that brought back Kent Mercker from the Reds back to the Braves – he allowed just three runs out of the pen in 17 innings, though his 7:7 strikeout to walk ratio was terrifying.

The second-most effective draftee was Jason Marquis, and the third-most-effective was Ryan Langerhans, and no one else taken in those rounds contributed positive WAR in the majors.

In fact, because the early rounds yielded such poor returns, the two most successful draftees taken during the period were actually taken during the later rounds.

The overall most successful draftee from 1994-1999 was Marcus Giles, who was a draft-and-follow, taken in the 53rd round before the practice was outlawed. Career rWAR: 16.7.

The second-most-successful draftee was a seventh-rounder taken out of the Ivy League: Mark DeRosa. Career rWAR: 10.6.

In fact, the Braves did not really have a successful early-round draft pick during the decade of the 1990s after taking Chipper Jones first overall in 1990. All of their other best-performing draftees were taken in later rounds, and mostly in the early years of the decade, from Jason Schmidt (1991 8th round, 29.5 WAR) to Kevin Millwood (1993 11th round, 29.8 WAR) and Jermaine Dye (1993 17th round, 20.3 WAR), and even Tony Graffanino (1990 10th Round, 15.1 WAR).

And that’s really it: the highlights, lowlights, and the in-between.

Bottom Line

The Braves’ draft teams have certainly been more successful this millennium than they were during the last decade of the previous one. And while it’s a little too soon to tell about the most recent years, it seems like they’ve managed to improve their performance over the past decade compared to how they did in the one before that.

But it’s not just a predilection for soft-tossing lefties. They had everything from raw sluggers who failed to develop (Cody Johnson) to athletes who failed to consolidate their skills (George Lombard) to everything else. And every team has those kinds of failures, of course. But the Braves like to promote a reputation for being a first-class organization in everything they do, and it’s worth pointing out where they’ve struggled.

They haven’t drafted particularly effectively for much of their run of success!