Two Top Braves Prospects Fall Slightly in Updated Prospect List

The Atlanta Braves have two top pitching talents with suboptimal stats so far in 2024

Atlanta Braves starting pitcher AJ Smith-Shawver dropped a bit in the newest Baseball America Top 100 Prospects list / Kim Klement Neitzel-USA TODAY Sports

The Atlanta Braves have a farm system built on pitching. 

With all eight defensive positions under team control for multiple seasons, Atlanta’s wisely shifted their focus to pitcher acquisition. Atlanta’s 61% of MLB Draft bonus money allocated towards pitching prospects from 2018-2023 is the highest percentage of all 30 MLB teams, with only eight other clubs reaching 50% and only Atlanta over 60%. 

And it’s paid off, with the Braves planning different “waves” of pitching prospects that are ready to debut each season for the next few years. These arms coming up provide reinforcements to a rotation that could potentially lose Max Fried and Charlie Morton after 2024 and have uncertainty about the status of Spencer Strider’s availability to open 2025. 

But development isn’t always linear, and there’s a lot of disagreement about where certain prospects should rank. That’s evident in the newest update to Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects list, originally put out in January and updated this morning after the first month of the minor league season. 

In the original list for 2024, which came out back in January, Hurston Waldrep (#49) and AJ Smith-Shawver (#42) landed inside the top 50, but today’s update pushes them back a bit. 

Where are they ranked now?

Smith-Shawver comes in at #66 on the May update, falling 24 spots. It’s entirely likely that this is due to his statistical results in AAA Gwinnett to start the season: In five starts, Smith-Shawver has a 1-1 record and 5.09 ERA, striking out twenty-one and walking nine in his 17.2 innings. 

But the minor leagues are more for development than competition, and Smith-Shawver’s no exception to that. We saw a pattern in spring training of the uber-athletic righthander prioritizing changeup usage over statistical results, and those deliberate pitch mix choices have continued in the minor leagues this season (as well as usage restrictions). He’s increased both his changeup usage and the situations in which he throws that pitch. He’s also been working under pitch count restrictions, starting off with thirty pitches in his first start and gradually increasing to 84 with yesterday’s win for Gwinnett. 

AJ Smith-Shawver hits 100 with the fastball and ties for minor league lead with seventeen whiffs on Wednesday (nine on the fastball)

Went five scoreless innings with three hits, one walk, and five strikeouts in 84 pitches (57 strikes) https://t.co/LCf3RJVYiI pic.twitter.com/DrSdaCrLWR

— Lindsay Crosby, big baseball guy (@CrosbyBaseball) May 2, 2024

The goal here is for Smith-Shawver to be prepared to come up and help the major league roster in 2024. He threw 103 innings last season (at twenty years old!), and a jump of more than 40 or 50 innings isn’t that realistic if the goal is for him to still be effective (and healthy) late in the season. 

Hurston Waldrep’s dealing with some of the same disappointing statistics as Smith-Shawver, with the righthander currently sporting a 0-3 record and 5.68 ERA after his first four starts for AA Mississippi. His Baseball America ranking, correspondingly, has slid from #49 to #68, losing nineteen spots.  Waldrep’s struck out seventeen and walked ten in his 19 innings pitched, surrendering twenty-six hits (including two homers). 

But a lot of Waldrep’s statistical issues can be traced back to his first start, an abbreviated 2.2-inning outing against Pensacola where he allowed seven runs on eleven hits. Since that start, he has a 2.76 ERA and is coming off of two consecutive quality starts, going six innings with only one run allowed against both Birmingham and Montgomery on the road. 

Does it mean anything? 

I don’t think there’s anything to be read into both Smith-Shawver and Waldrep moving back in the Top 100 rankings. There’s not much of a difference in a ranking in the 40s and a ranking in the 60s, given that there’s an average of 900 rated prospects among the ~5000 minor leaguers in domestic leagues at any given time. (International players in the Dominican Summer League are not counted against a team’s allotted minor league headcount of 165 minor leaguers). 

As long as they’re ready to pitch at the major league level when they’re called up, that’s all that matters.