The deadline to add players to the 40-man roster to protect them from being selected in the Rule 5 Draft came and went on Tuesday. The Braves didn’t make any moves, leaving Blake Burkhalter, Ian Mejia, and David McCabe, among others that are even longer shots to get picked in the Rule 5 Draft, unprotected.
The one that surprised some/many was Burkhalter. He was pretty good as a starter in Double-A, and struggled as a bulk-esque type in Triple-A, but he’s only 25 and was thought to be fast track-able if inserted into a reliever role. Burkhalter’s specifics and outlook aside, probably the weirder part is that the Braves only have 37 guys on their roster right now as it is, and that includes guys like Brett Wisely and the recently-claimed Carson Ragsdale and Josh Walker, so the price to protect Burkhalter and/or someone else was a teeny-tiny bit of forgone flexibility.
On the flip side, the Braves may have felt there was no real risk in not protecting Burkhalter for two reasons. First, relief arms that get picked in the Rule 5 Draft generally get returned. Second, when they don’t, they rarely matter.
Ahead of the 2025 season, there were 11 pitchers taken in the Rule 5 Draft. Seven of those were returned or otherwise didn’t stick with their claiming team the whole year. Another three spent the whole year recovering from injury, and don’t really “count” for the sake of comparing to Burkhalter. The last was Shane Smith, whom the White Sox used entirely as a starter.
Go back a year, and you have eight pitchers taken, of which four didn’t last the season with their claiming team. Of the remaining four, one was a swingman starter, and of the three truly-relief guys, only Ryan Fernandez really made his original team feel like their pocket got picked. (Fernandez was then horrible in 2025, go figure.) The other two guys, Anthony Molina and Stephen Kolek, were just generic, unexciting relievers.
Back to 2023 now, and we have 11 pitchers taken again, of which just three made it through the season with their new team. All three were truly horrible and somehow avoided getting cut; Mason Englert eventually had a mini-breakout in 2025, but only after he was traded to the Rays.
The lockout nuked the pre-2022 season Rule 5, but the pre-2021 season version was a barnburner, with 14 pitchers taken in total. Of those 14, five made it to season’s end without being traded/returned/etc., headlined by Garrett Whitlock, who’s turned into a giant Rule 5 coup for the Red Sox by being a dominant reliever every time he’s gotten the chance to do so. The other three have been a mixed bag: one was below-replacement, one was not much above replacement, Trevor Stephan was awful in his post-draft year but then amazing the year after, and Tyler Wells was great in his post-draft year and then transitioned to starting, where he’s been generic and injured a lot.
So, if you squint and think about recent trends, pure reliever picks in the Rule 5 aren’t exactly paying off, and the Braves may be banking on that. Or, they might just be getting wild with their plans for the 40-man roster this offseason.
All that said, the question remains the same: do you think they’ll regret not adding Burkhalter and/or friends to the roster?
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