2025 MLB Draft top 50 prospects rankings: Ethan Holliday, Liam Doyle leading the way

New York Times

15-04-2025

We're now past the midpoint of the college baseball regular season, when just about every high school prospect of note has begun his spring season as well, making it a good time to update the rankings of the best players in this year's draft class. As I said in the first ranking in March, this is a deep class, but it's weaker than ever at the very top, rivaling the 2016 draft for the worst top echelon of any draft I've ever covered. That's going to mean we see a lot of well-under-slot deals this year, maybe right at the very first pick, to make up for the fact that none of these players would have gone first or second in a typical year, probably not even in the top five picks in the loaded 2023 class.
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There is real depth in this draft, though: There's a huge group of high school shortstops, many of whom project to stay there for the long term, along with a strong set of college left-handed starters and at least an average group of hard-hitting college outfielders. The college catching crop isn't bad, either, although the high school group is almost nonexistent; the two best ones are probably going to end up in the outfield. It's a good year to pick later in the first round, and still a good year to have an extra pick or two.
The SEC and ACC remain the powerhouses of talent they've always been. The California high school group is the best it's been in several years. The Pacific Northwest has four high schoolers on this top 50 plus two college hitters; the Chicago area has two guys on this list, and could see two more on the top 100 that we'll release next month. The Mid-Atlantic and Northeast are down, and Georgia is weak for the second year in a row.
I'll do a full top 100 Big Board at some point in early May; it'll be easier to do that than it has been to figure out who goes in the top 10 here and in what order. As a reminder, this is a ranking, not a prediction of who'll be drafted where (I'll start doing that in May as well). I've seen 31 of the players on this list myself this spring, and I add my own scouting notes on those players to what I've learned from talking to scouts and directors, reviewing video and looking at data on these players where available. This ranking is my best attempt to say in what order I'd draft these players if I were a scouting director for an MLB team, based on the best information I have right now.
(Notes: Scouting grades are on a traditional 20-80 scale; 'the shadow' refers to space just past the strike zone, usually measured by the size of one baseball.)
(Top photo illustration by Will Tullos / The Athletic; photos left to right of Liam Doyle, Ethan Holliday, Jamie Arnold — Isaiah Vazquez, Aaron M. Sprecher, Dustin Bradford / Getty Images)