Don’t underestimate the significance of this one game. Last night, a whole bunch of good things happened. One data point is not a trend, but if you’re looking for reasons to clear away the doooooom and start feeling a bit better about the world, last night had them in spades.

  1. Shabbos Schwellenbach shoved.
  2. Drake Baldwin went 3-4 and has a team-leading .939 OPS.
  3. Ozzie Albies had his first multihit game in almost two weeks.
  4. The offense produced eleven hits and drew two walks – including one by Michael Harris! – and scored in four different innings.
  5. Dylan Lee and Pierce Johnson cleaned up in the 8th and 9th innings. They’re both quietly having very good years.
  6. El De La Sabana – jonrón! Ronald started a game in the Florida Complex League and hit a homer to center; he’ll go to Triple-A tomorrow.

The Braves finally reached the .500 mark on their fifth attempt, and did so in a refreshingly relaxed fashion: while the Nats scored single runs in the first and fourth, he held them there, and after the Braves tied it in the fourth on Drake Baldwin’s wall-scraper, they scored unanswered individual runs in three of the next four innings, as Raisel Iglesias got the night off.

I still remember a comment that Mac Thomason made in the mid-2000s that identified Brian McCann as the most important player in the organization, as a catcher who had jumped from Double-A to the majors at age 21 and held his own offensively with a .278/.345/.400 batting line and a poised defensive approach. Drake Baldwin is 24, but I’m getting similar vibes. His power is clearly already pretty good, but it’s his plate approach by which I’m finding myself inordinately impressed. From the moment he joined the team he had the best offensive approach of any position player on the team. He got robbed of multiple homers in the opening week of the season, but he’s not getting cheated now.

Ronald Acuna, Jr. is the best player on the team, but Drake Baldwin is the best position player prospect we’ve graduated since Ronald, and I think he’s nearly as important to this team’s future success as McCann was to that team’s. There’s a logjam at catcher right now, as Murphy is being paid to be a starter and Baldwin is too good to be a backup. For 2025, that can remain a good problem to have, but within the next 12 months, that problem will need to be resolved, or it will resolve itself.

(That said, to respond to Rob’s comment on the last thread, I don’t think the Braves should move Baldwin to the outfield.

Putting a catcher in the outfield occasionally works – Bryce Harper, Wil Myers, Jayson Werth, Dale Murphy – but you generally want to do it in the minors, and you want to do it because the guy can’t defend well enough to stay behind the dish and you want to get his bat in the lineup as soon as possible. Drake Baldwin is here in the majors today and he can credibly play the hardest defensive position on the diamond. Moving Baldwin to the outfield comes with significant risks – you don’t want him getting a leg injury, like Chipper Jones did shortly after moving out to left, and you don’t want to compromise his development by asking him to learn a new position for the first time in the majors.

The more recent catcher-outfielders I can recall the Braves employing are Ryan Doumit and Eli Marrero, and generously, neither of them was starting catcher material. Update: also Evan Gattis, though he was basically a DH.

Obviously, I didn’t want the Braves to trade Contreras either, and they didn’t listen to me, so it’s certainly possible that they’ll try this, as it would solve their huge outfield black hole, but it’s not a risk I’d want them to take.)