It will be several years until we can fully appreciate the Atlanta Braves’ 2019 draft, but it’s the perfect time to look back at each draftee’s performance this past season.
Today we’ve reached the middle of the Atlanta Braves 2019 draft class, the third post of our 2019 Draft Grades series.
No more non-signers, as all ten of the following players were drafted and signed, though each performance this past season still varied widely.
However, there are a couple of players within this list that will most likely crack a few Braves’ prospect rankings this upcoming season, after more than fulfilling expectations in their first taste of professional baseball.
To jump back to the Braves’ first two groups of players from the 2019 draft:
- Post #1: Picks 41-31
- Post #2: Picks 30-21
Also, a refresher on what it is we’re doing in this exercise…
The Method
In this series, we will look at each and every player drafted (and signed) by the Braves in 2019, though to break this up a bit we’ll cover the class in four pieces, with today’s column covering picks 20 down to 11.
The group of 10 will include a table featuring each player’s last minor league level reached, and most importantly — as a way to characterize each player’s 2019 performance — I will give each player a grade:
- A: excelled
- B: held his own
- C: struggled
This may seem like an oversimplified way to go about such a thing, but the focus here is less about the actual grading rubric and more about simply determining how each player performed in their first professional season.
Choosing A, B and C obviously allows for only three different grade outcomes, which is plenty for such a small sample of results (most of these players played no more than 30-35 games).
We must remember that these players were drafted for a reason and giving a struggling 18-year-old an ‘F’ in his first taste of minor league baseball probably doesn’t accurately represent his actual skills on a baseball field.
So don’t interpret each grade as a description of the player’s talent level.