Seven Games, Sixty-Nine Years

The last Brave to score a run in each of his team's first seven games was a 23-year-old outfielder in Milwaukee who would finish that season with an MVP award and a World Series ring. Drake Baldwin is not Hank Aaron. But the franchise record they now share tells you something about what Baldwin has become.

The record is a curiosity — the kind of early-season footnote that surfaces in broadcast graphics and disappears by June. Before Aaron accomplished it in 1957, you have to go back to Jimmy Collins with the 1900 Boston Beaneaters. Three men across 126 years of franchise baseball. A small club with an enormous shadow.

But the number that matters is not seven. It is nine.

Baldwin leads Major League Baseball in runs scored. Nine runs through seven games, for a 25-year-old catcher in his second full season who is slashing .286/.375/.643 with a 1.018 OPS. That slash line is not a fluke sustained by one hot weekend — it is a continuation of the thesis I laid out earlier this week: the strikeout rate is the story, not the batting average. Through 28 plate appearances, Baldwin has struck out twice. A 9.1% rate. For context, league average for catchers last season hovered near 24%. He is not just making contact. He is making the right kind of contact, with enough authority to push his slugging from last year's .469 to a current .643.

The sophomore leap is real, and it is architectural. His OPS has jumped from .810 in his Rookie of the Year campaign to 1.018. The power surge — three home runs, matching his pace from 2025 — now comes wrapped in better plate discipline and harder-hit balls. The floor keeps revealing more floor beneath it.

Aaron's 1957 deserves its own paragraph, because invoking it carelessly would be a disservice to both players. That season — .322/.378/.600, 44 home runs, 132 RBI, 118 runs scored, NL MVP — was the start of something the franchise is still reckoning with. The Milwaukee Braves won the World Series over the Yankees in seven games. His number 44 is visible from nearly every angle of Truist Park.

Baldwin tying that record does not place him on Aaron's trajectory. Seven games is not 162. But it places him in a specific lineage of young Braves hitters who arrived running — who scored from the first day and never stopped. Aaron was 23 that year. Baldwin is 25 now. Both homegrown cornerstones at the beginning of something they could not yet name.

The game that clinched the tie was, in its own right, a small masterpiece of patience rewarded.

Grant Holmes — the spot where the optimism frays, as I wrote yesterday — threw six innings of one-hit ball against Arizona. A sharp Ketel Marte line drive in the sixth was the only thing that reached. Four strikeouts, zero earned runs. His first start produced a 5.40 ERA. His second produced something closer to revelation. The rehab-over-surgery gamble on his partial UCL tear got a second data point: combined ERA after two starts, 2.45.

Eduardo Rodriguez matched Holmes zero for zero. For eight innings at Chase Field, the game rewarded no one.

Then the ninth happened. Ozzie Albies drove a 0-1 pitch from Paul Sewald over the right-field fence. Before the crowd could process it, Matt Olson sent the next delivery to left. Back-to-back. Two pitches, two runs, 2-0 final. Iglesias worked a clean ninth for his first save. The Braves improved to 6-2.

Somewhere in that eruption, Baldwin scored his run. It is the quietest detail in the loudest moment, and that is fitting. Baldwin's value is not theatrical — it is structural. He gets on base. He moves around the diamond. He crosses home plate with a consistency that, through seven games, only two other players in franchise history have matched from the start of a season.

Sean Murphy begins his rehab assignment at High-A Rome on April 8. When I wrote that Baldwin had made Murphy's return "a luxury rather than a necessity," it was based on 22 at-bats. Now it is 28, and the argument has only strengthened. Murphy will return, and the Braves will be richer for it. But the conversation has shifted. It is no longer about who catches. It is about what Baldwin is becoming.

Baseball has a long memory. Sixty-nine years separate Baldwin's name from Aaron's on this list. The record is a trivia answer, a broadcast graphic, a footnote in the game notes. But the player who tied it is not a footnote. He is a 25-year-old catcher with a 1.018 OPS, a strikeout rate that belongs in another era, and a habit of crossing home plate that the franchise has not seen since Milwaukee.