Drake Baldwin Is the Best Catcher in Baseball and You Already Know It

Drake Baldwin is the best catcher in baseball.

Not "emerging." Not "making a case." Not "in the conversation." The best. Right now. Today.

And nobody with a national platform will say it.

FanGraphs had him outside the top five before the season. ESPN's Buster Olney ranked him and called him "lowest upside of the top group." CBS, SI, all of them — Baldwin was an afterthought behind Cal Raleigh, Will Smith, William Contreras. The consensus was unanimous: Baldwin is fine, but the ceiling belongs to someone else.

Six weeks later, here's the scoreboard.

Cal Raleigh — the universal preseason number one — is hitting .161 with a .560 OPS. He's on the 10-day IL with an oblique injury. Broken. Will Smith is slashing .269/.336/.385. That's a 104 wRC+. League average. Your preseason number two is league average.

Baldwin? .297/.383/.509. Thirteen homers. Thirty-six RBIs. An .892 OPS. Top 15% in hard-hit rate. Leads all of Major League Baseball with 17 hits on pitches outside the strike zone — the man is hitting pitches he's not supposed to hit and punishing them. He's a lefty batting .889 against left-handed pitching. That's not a stat line. That's an insult to the scouting reports.

He's scored in 21 of the Braves' 31 wins. He matched Hank Aaron's franchise record by scoring in his first seven games. His MVP odds swung from +4500 in mid-April to +350. A 13x swing. The market figured it out before the media did.

I know the counter-argument. Shea Langeliers in Sacramento is putting up a monster line — .336/.390/.627, 178 wRC+, 10 homers. That's a real stat line from a real player.

He also plays in Sacramento.

Nobody is watching. His team isn't winning. He's putting up video game numbers in a stadium that draws fewer fans than a Waffle House at 3 AM. Langeliers is having a great individual season. Baldwin is having a great individual season on the best team in baseball. The Braves are 31-14. Context matters.

I wrote "Extend Baldwin Today" on April 10 when he was hitting .321 with a 1.013 OPS through seven games. I was at 75% on the extension, 95% that they should have done it yesterday. Chipper saw it coming. Ken Rosenthal is now floating $120 million extension numbers. The price did exactly what I said it would do: it went up.

I'm 89% sure Baldwin is the best catcher in baseball right now. Not by the end of the year. Not projecting forward. Right now, mid-May, with six weeks of evidence and the preseason favorites crumbling around him.

The 11% doubt is real. Framing metrics aren't his strength. The sample is still growing. And Langeliers exists, even if he exists in obscurity.

But the preseason rankings are ash. Raleigh is on the IL. Smith is average. And Baldwin is hitting .889 against same-side pitching on a team with the best record in the sport.

Every outlet that left him out of the top five owes him a correction. They won't publish one. They'll just quietly move him up in June and pretend they saw it coming.

I saw it coming. The receipts are right here.