Ryan Waldschmidt is a first-round pick to the Braves in two MLB mock drafts

In his second year in Lexington, Ryan Waldschmidt was an All-SEC selection for his spectacular season for the Wildcats. Bouncing back from a summer ACL injury, the transfer from Charleston Southern had one of the best offensive seasons the Kentucky baseball program has ever seen. Waldschmidt entered the 2024 postseason with a .370 batting average, 16 doubles, 11 home runs, 39 RBI, and 23 stolen bases. Limiting those numbers to conference play, Waldschmidt ranked third in the SEC, batting .405 with a fourth-best .510 OBP and the most doubles (12) and stolen bases (19) in the league.

His outstanding play continued in the NCAA Lexington Regional, where the left-fielder had five hits and four RBI in UK’s three wins, including a two-run homer against Illinois on Saturday. After that game, Nick Mingione said, “Waldy is never out of an at-bat. He’s special.”

The following day, Mingione named Waldschmidt’s emergence as an elite hitter as one of the two major changes to the lineup, the other being Ryan Nicholson hitting bombs. “Those two things have changed our lineup as much as anything.”

Supporting Mingione’s point, Waldschmidt has garnered much attention from the Big Leagues as his junior season winds down. In fact, the upcoming Super Regional at Kentucky Proud Park is likely the last time Ryan Waldschmidt plays baseball on UK’s campus. Soon, the Major League Baseball draft will call up the next crop of young talent, and Waldschmidt is one of the top prospects in the upcoming draft class. MLB.com ranked him at No. 39 in its Top 200 last week.

24th to the Braves

Before Waldschmidt’s All-Regional recognition, Baseball America called him the “late-rising data darling of the class,” while saying the Kentucky Wildcat is “getting first-round chatter.” This is in the 2024 Mock Draft 3.0 behind a paywall. In that mock draft, Waldschmidt is a projected first-rounder, going No. 24 to the Atlanta Braves.

ESPN had the same prediction–Waldschmidt to the Braves at 24th–in its paywalled mock draft. Kiley McDaniel wrote how Waldschmidt has “some of the best underlying TrackMan data in the country, right there with the hitters going in the top 10 picks.”

Like all the Kentucky Wildcats/Atlanta Braves fans out there, I would love to see those projections come to fruition, but not until Waldschmidt closes the book on his time at UK, hopefully with the school’s first trip to Omaha, maybe even the school’s first College World Series championship.

While we wait for the Supers, learn more about Waldschmidt, the MLB prospect, in the video from MLB.com below. Then, get to Kentucky Proud Park for the Regionals to support “Waldy” and the Cats this weekend.