Braves News: Draft signing tracker, trade deadline ramp-up, more

As we are now in the “break” part of the All-Star break, I am going to give my brief and moderately informed take on the Braves’ draft class. On the positive side, I am quite excited at some of the picks in this class, particularly first rounder Hurston Waldrep and fifth rounder Isaiah Drake. This draft conformed about as much as I can remember from a recent Braves’ draft to the earlier rounds producing the more exciting picks to a non-scouting person like myself. Maybe it’s the lack of prep players taken after Drake in the fifth. With that being said, there do seem to be intriguing things in the profile of most of Atlanta’s picks, and maybe in a draft that was reportedly extremely strong, like this one, it makes more sense to try to make every pick count as a real prospect, rather than picking some players like last year that were expected to sign for almost nothing to save money for prep gambles elsewhere. The Braves’ strategy last year was also affected by having an additional comp round A pick from trading Drew Waters.

I do still wish that the Braves had picked a real shortstop prospect, as Ceballos does not seem likely to stick at the position (although I would be happy to be proven wrong here), but the Braves added some high upside arms in Waldrep, Kuehler, and Baumann, some potential future relievers, a guy who has an exciting profile similar to Michael Harris who we have seen the Braves rapidly mold into a star in Drake, and a guy with real talent and reportedly off the charts intangibles in Ceballos. It sounds like a good draft to me, although perhaps not what we expected. It is also interesting and fun that Fangraphs absolutely loves Waldrep, ranking him as a top 100 prospect in MiLB right now, the #6 prospect in the draft, and writing this cool piece about him.

Braves News

We have our immensely popular annual Braves draft pick signing tracker live.

Sam put out an article looking at a potential realistic trade target.

MLB News

Cardinals’ president says “we’re going to trade people”. The Cardinals have a number of potential blue chip trade targets.

The A’s are calling up two of their top three prospects.

Projected top 10 2024 MLB Draft pick Chase Burns announced he is transferring to Wake Forest and their vaunted pitching lab that has produced two recent Atlanta first round picks.

MLB announced some details of the league’s international series for 2024.

The Brewers and Dodgers made a minor trade.

The White Sox and Royals made a minor trade.