What will Drake Baldwin produce in 2026?

"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."

"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."

"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.)"

Forecasting performance for MLB players becomes more reliable with several seasons of big-league experience, while rookies and second-year players carry greater uncertainty. A confidence metric capturing distributional uncertainty helps quantify that risk. Historical research found assuming league-average performance for to-debut rookies can outperform attempts to extrapolate from minor-league data. Drake Baldwin fits the second-year profile: a third-round 2022 draftee who rose quickly through High-A and Triple-A, earned a 2025 big-league opportunity after Sean Murphy's injury, and delivered an excellent rookie season. The central question is whether Baldwin will sustain, improve, or regress from that early success.

Read at Battery Power