Atlanta Braves Top 36 Prospects

Below is an outlook analysis of the Atlanta Braves farm system. The scouting reports have been compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth year we’ve delineated two expected relief roles, for which you’ll see the abbreviations in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers . The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player must be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being eligible for the Rule 5 Draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use them as rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much more in-depth overview can be found here.

All prospects ranked below also appear on The Board, a resource offered by the site containing sortable scouting information for each organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from a variety of sources) than this article and incorporates each team’s roster so readers can compare prospects between farm systems. It can be found here.

Other perspectives worth noting

Grouped by type and ranked in order of preference within each category.

Tilt depth
Parker Dunshee, RHP
Darius Vines, RHP
Ian Mejia, RHP
Drew Parrish, LHP
Luis De Avila, LHP

Dunshee has been floating at the bottom of prospect lists for a little over half a decade now. The 29-year-old is dominating Triple-A this year by mixing several different breaking balls with his high-90s fastball. Vines is a second-day draft success story who made his big league debut. He sits at around 89 mph and has a four-pitch mix headlined by his changeup. Mejia was a 2022 11th-rounder out of New Mexico State. The 6-foot-3 right-hander dominated Double-A with his plus slider; the rest of his repertoire is below average. Parrish and De Avila are smooth lefties with good secondary stuff. Parrish has a positive changeup, while De Avila has a more balanced slider/changeup duo.

Young tools
Luis Parababire, C.
Ethan Workinger, OF
John Estevez, L.F.
John Gil, S.S.
Isaiah Drake, OF

Parababire is a physically mature 18-year-old catcher with above-average bat speed. Workinger was an undrafted JUCO outfielder from San Diego in 2020. He moved up to the High-A level as an explosive rotator with impressive power but an ineffective bat flight. Estevez, 18, is a projectable 6-foot-3 outfield prospect in Florida rookie ball. His swing is compact almost to the point of lacking the punch needed for an outside corner. Gil and Drake (whose brother Kenyan is a journeyman NFL running back) are speed-only players that I’m skeptical of.

A monster pitch
Brooks Wilson, RHP
Hayden Harris, LHP

Wilson, 28, is a small, athletic right-handed reliever who was injured for most of 2022 and 2023. He’s back and was walk-prone in Gwinnett, sitting in the low 90s with a shot angle and a devastating separator. Harris, 25, is a 2022 undrafted free agent whose extreme drop-and-drive delivery creates significant upward angle on his fastball, which he throws more than 80 percent of the time. He opened Double-A with a score of 91-92.

Young guns
Seth Keller, RHP
Edward Cedano, RHP
Luis Arestigueta, RHP

Keller is another of several former two-way athletic players that the Braves are drafting and trying to develop as pitchers. He’s listed as active on his MiLB player page but hasn’t pitched in a while, and despite trying to figure out why, I haven’t been able to so far. He was a good developmental prospect with low-90s Heat and a good breaking ball when he was drafted. Cedano, a short 18-year-old right-hander, walked a batter per inning in last year’s DSL and is back there in 2024. Yesterday, he sat 94-97 in his first start of the season. ‘year. Arestigueta is an 18-year-old Venezuelan right-hander living in a resort in Florida. He has a prototypical 6-foot-3 frame and could throw much harder than his current 90-93 on the road, but his arm action is currently very long and inconsistent.

Famous fallen
Jesse Franklin V, L.F.
Ambioris Tavarez, SS
Diego Bénitez, 3B
Douglas Glod, C.F.
Geraldo Quintero, L.F.

Franklin at times looked like he had enough power to become a part-time corner outfielder, but he wasn’t able to stay healthy long enough to put himself on the big league radar. He hit 15 homers in Double-A last year, but he lost nearly 30 percent of the time and now has shoulder tendinitis. Tavarez, 20, signed for $1.5 million in 2021, but he has had three straight years of red flag strikeout rates. He sits near the top of this group because of his defensive ability at shortstop. Benitez signed for $2.5 million in 2022 and had two years of near-average offensive performance before starting to struggle so mightily at Augusta this year that he was demoted to the complex. He didn’t look great on both sides of the ball when I saw him in Florida a few weeks ago. Glod signed for $1.3 million in 2022 and is past the point where his build is maxed out. He has a late-career Kirby Puckett look on the complex. The diminutive 5-foot-5 Geraldo Quintero now plays primarily left field, whereas he once looked like a switch-hitting midfield utility man.

System overview

This system has average high end but below average depth, especially on the position player side of the ledger. Let’s not confuse a poor farm system with poor scouting or player development, however. The Braves are good at this and have a stable roster of big league contenders that is simply injured and somewhat underperforming at this point in the 2024 season. So many team player positions in the big league will be occupied by their current heirs for the foreseeable future that, business considerations aside, it’s fitting that the Braves are really only set up to produce good pitchers in the near future. The attributes they are looking for in the draft (athletic two-way players or underdeveloped guys from a small school) require a cohesive relationship between teams’ scouting and player development departments to facilitate the improvement we often see in Braves pitching prospects.

A common theme among the weapons in this system is that they have hard, fastballs that play downfield, and Atlanta’s pitchers often throw backwards relative to their secondarys, even in the lower minors. There is less consistency within the organization in terms of launch height and fastball shape than other analytically inclined teams tend to show. This is further evidence that the Braves tend to scout the athlete rather than focusing solely on data, at least when it comes to the amateur draft.

Internationally, things have gotten worse here. Atlanta’s richest signees haven’t made early career leaps lately, and some of them have fizzled quickly. The decision to push Jose Perdomo to the domestic complex right away is very strange (I can’t think of anyone who wasn’t an older signee who completely ignored the DSL) and exciting, although I was disappointed that he was active at the time I crossed the Florida Gulf Coast to see him and his peers. It would be pretty smart of Atlanta to keep him sidelined until the trade deadline. They arguably have some needs at the big league level due to injuries. Taking Perdomo off the table because clubs haven’t been able to see him, especially if you think he’s the one teams would covet the most, would be a masterclass in scouting play. There is plenty of time after the deadline, especially if the Braves ask for him this year, for him to get meaningful playing time even if his rehab is managed very conservatively.