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The SEC opened conference play this past weekend and there were a bunch of great matchups. The most surprising result was Tennessee’s sweep of Florida, as both teams entered the series ranked in the top 10. At this point, the Volunteers look like the best team in college baseball. Outside of the SEC, Stanford’s Japanese phenom Rintaro Sasaki hit his first career home run on Saturday, and we saw a four-homer day from Northwestern’s Trent Liolios.
Sticking to the theme of last week, these notes are on draft-eligible players who are not currently listed on The Board, as it’s still too early to rank them, but who nonetheless should hear their names called this July. Read the rest of this entry »
Angelina Alcantar/News Sentinel/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
We’re a month into the college season, and while it’s too early to make definitive statements about players, enough time has passed for a few to begin setting themselves apart from their peers. As we head into conference play, I wanted to highlight a few guys who weren’t listed on The Board when we launched our initial rankings during Prospect Week, but who have stood out in the early going. One has been added to The Board, while the others might find their way there before Day One rolls around.
Liam Doyle, LHP, Tennessee Weekend Line: 5.2 IP, 13 K, 2 BB, 0.00 ERA vs. St. Bonaventure
Liam Doyle stormed onto the scene to start the year and is looking like one of the top pitching prospects in the entire class. He’s had a nomadic career so far, spending his freshman year at Coastal Carolina before transferring Ole Miss as a sophomore. Now the Friday night guy at Tennessee, he’s made four starts, posting a 0.44 ERA with a 61.8% K-BB%, highest amongst qualified D-I pitchers.
What makes Doyle special is his fastball, which sits in the mid-90s, tops out at 99 mph, and boasts a unique movement profile. He routinely gets over 20 inches of vertical break on it to go with 13 inches of horizontal break, and he generates a shallow approach angle that helps it play up even more. For a variety of reasons, college pitch metrics tend to overstate the amount of movement a pitch will have once a player gets into affiliated ball, but it’s one of the best fastballs in college baseball. Read the rest of this entry »
If you were looking for differences between collegiate and professional baseball, you wouldn’t have to try very hard to find them. One of my favorites is the value and frequency of the hit-by-pitch.
College hitters get plunked more often than big leaguers for three reasons: First, college pitchers have worse command, as a rule, than their professional counterparts. Second, while the quality of play is high in college baseball, it’s not quite high enough to weed out all the weirdos. So you’ll get guys with no nerve endings in one of their arms who are quite happy to trade a welt for a free trip to first base. Read the rest of this entry »
When David Appelman announced on Monday that we were adding college stats to our player pages and leaderboards, more than one person reached out to congratulate me personally. I had nothing to do with the conception or implementation of this blessed happening, but it is true: FanGraphs having college stats could not be more up my alley.
I wanted to play around with the new leaderboard, but this early in the season, there’s little to be gleaned. No pitcher has made more than four starts; no team has played more than 14 games. And most of the action we’ve seen so far has been nonconference throat-clearing, mismatches between blue bloods and mid-majors. The numbers will tell, but not for another few weeks.
So I decided to go back to the roots of the sabermetrics movement. Our college leaderboards might not have all the latest fancy Statcast stuff, but we’ve got FIP and K% and all sorts of things you wouldn’t take for granted if you’ve ever had to calculate a pitcher’s WHIP by hand on the back of a box score in a MAC press box. When we got all that stuff in the pro game, what did we do with it?
I’m happy to announce that we’ve added Division I college data to the site. You can access the data via the player pages and leaderboards.
Some things to be aware of:
Division I data is updated daily and is available going back to 2021.
wRC+, ERA-, and FIP- are conference adjusted, but not park adjusted.
College data on the player pages is hidden by default for players who have more than one year of minor league data. It can be viewed by clicking on the “College” toggle right above any data table.
We’re able to bring new features to the site because of Member support. If you enjoy our new college data, or any of our content, please consider becoming a FanGraphs Member. Membership benefits currently include:
Thank you for your support. Please let us now if you run into any issues with the new college data, either in the comments below or through our support page.
Joseph Cress/Iowa City Press-Citizen/USA TODAY NETWORK
One of the most exciting developments of 2025 is also one of the most surprising: Love Is Blind has its mojo back. After a white-hot start in 2020, Netflix’s reality dating show put out three consecutive snoozefest seasons in 2023 and 2024. (The entire D.C. season could’ve been an email.)
But the first six episodes of Season 8 debuted last Friday, covering the first phase of the show, and it’s been a hot minute since we saw this much drama in the pods. Far from the usual slate of boring couples playing along just to stay on TV, this season has had (I’ll try to avoid spoilers) a love quadrilateral, a shocking violation of show norms, and multiple contestants just packing it in and going home. It’s been a blast.
Here’s something else Season 8 has: Multiple former college baseball players. That’s right, it’s not a nightmare, we’re talking about reality. Read the rest of this entry »
This is David’s first piece as a FanGraphs prospect contributor. He is from Northwest Indiana and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Statistics at Indiana University. He previously wrote for Down on the Farm, and has given talks at the SABR Analytics Conference and Saberseminar.
Earlier today, Eric Longenhagen launched his 2025 Draft Board, highlighting the top draft prospects in this year’s class. In this piece, I want to look a bit further into the future and focus on some of the college underclassmen you’ll want to keep an eye on this year. I selected a pitcher and a hitter from each of the Power 4 conferences, along with two non-Power 4 underclassmen and one unique true freshman. Of course, there’s a lot more talent in these conferences than just the guys I have listed here, but this should give you some idea of the players to watch over the next couple of seasons.
ACC
Drew Burress, CF, Georgia Tech
Burress hit .381/.512/.821 with 25 home runs in 58 games as a freshman at Georgia Tech last year. At a stocky 5-foot-9, he doesn’t necessarily look the part, but if you look past his size, there aren’t many holes in his game. He doesn’t whiff much, he doesn’t chase much, and he has plus power that he gets to in games due to a swing path that lets him lift the ball. Burress is loose in the box and has an interesting stance, with his bat pointed towards the ground and his lead elbow pointed high in the air. There’s length to the swing at times, but he’s shown the ability to get the bat on the ball wherever it’s pitched. Defensively, Burress spent all 58 games in center field last season. His feel for the position is still developing, but there’s a solid underlying foundation here because of his above-average speed. Overall, he’s the front runner to be the no. 1 overall pick in 2026 as someone who plays a premium position with a well-rounded offensive profile. Read the rest of this entry »
Today is the first day of the 2025 college baseball season, and to celebrate, we’re cutting the ribbon on our 2025 Draft prospect rankings and scouting reports. They’re now live on The Board, so head over there for all these players’ tool grades and reports. In this piece, I’ll touch on several individual players who I think are among this year’s best and most interesting prospects, and discuss the class as a whole from a talent standpoint, as well as which teams are in position to have a huge draft.
First, some quick housekeeping on the rankings. I’ve got just shy of 100 players on The Board right now. I’ve hard-ranked the players with a 40+ FV and above, while the 40 FV players are clustered by demographic below them. At this stage in the draft process, players are more in “neighborhoods” or clusters. It’s too early to have hundreds of players ordinally ranked, because the deeper you go, the more those rankings will change between now and draft day. On this update, I’ve tried to include players who have the best chance to take a leap during this season and climb The Board. This is definitely a ceiling-heavy list at this stage, in part because so many of the higher-floored players tend to reveal themselves during the college season. New prospect contributor David Gerth, whose debut piece will run later today, helped produce the reports on the players in the Big Ten conference. Obviously, there will be much more to come in the next few months as guys separate themselves from their peers, and new standouts emerge. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s Valentine’s Day, and instead of being out on the town with your beloved, you’re sitting on the sofa bingewatching the latest installment of a streaming entertainment institution. Not the new season of Love is Blind; the new season of college baseball.
Baseball is like football and basketball, in that a large part of the appeal of the college game is its abundance. Not every game is worth watching, but with some 300 Division I schools to choose from, there’s a good chance that somewhere out there, there’s a close game in the bottom of the ninth, or a pitchers’ duel between top prospects, or a rivalry matchup with postseason implications. It’s borderline-impossible to remember the names of all 300 teams, much less any useful information about them. So in the interest of efficiency, here are seven schools I’ll have my eye on this season, because I think they’ll have an outsize influence on the shape of this season as a whole.
Oregon State
I’m not going to say this is the most excited I’ve ever been for a college team, ever. But it’s the most excited I’ve been for a college team without multiple contenders for the no. 1 overall pick, like the Kumar Rocker/Jack Leiter Vandy team, or Paul Skenes and Dylan Crews at LSU. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, I covered some of the Midwest prep players from this recent draft class who I was able to see in person several times over the past couple of years. This set of notes will cover some recent college draftees (from both four-year programs and junior colleges) who I caught this year in Kansas and Oklahoma.
Cranton will turn 24 years old in October and is a nearly finished product who can be expected to move through the minor leagues quickly. He has a rangy 6-foot-3 frame and throws from a high arm slot, and there’s violent effort in every pitch. His fastball sat 95-98 mph in most of my looks and touched triple digits a couple of times throughout the year. Cranton doesn’t create much extension, but he still creates plus riding action on his four-seamer because of how well he backspins it, and he’s fully capable of bullying hitters in the zone. At its best, his upper-80s slider is a hard, two-plane breaker with late enough action to generate above-average chase rates, but Cranton also has a tendency to lose the hard vertical finish that is most responsible for it generating whiffs. Cranton is a power-over-precision single-inning relief type who signed a below-slot $50,000 deal. He will likely be assigned to one of Seattle’s A-ball affiliates, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he were to finish the regular season at Double-A or higher.
The headliner of Davis’ three-pitch mix is a changeup that I’d argue warrants a 70 future grade. It ran a 51% in-zone whiff rate this year and has late diving action in the low-80s that he sells especially well with his arm speed. Davis was in the Sooners’ rotation this season, sitting 90-93 mph with his fastball and touching 95 when he emptied the tank. He throws from a high slot and hides the ball well with his online arm path, which allows his fastball to sneak by hitters, especially when it’s located up in the zone. His breaking ball is a low-80s slider that will show traditional two-plane action and at times incorporate more depth. It’s an offering that profiles to play much better against same-sided hitters; Davis will likely need to lean much more heavily on his changeup against right-handed batters. Davis trimmed his walk rate to 10.5% in 2024 after running a 15% walk rate in Sam Houston State’s bullpen the year prior. His command will need to take another large developmental step forward for him to be viable as a starter at the big league level, but we could be looking at a solid multi-inning relief type whose stuff ticks up in shorter bursts, enabling him to move quickly through the minors. Davis and the Cardinals agreed to a deal for the slot amount of $485,700. He’ll be an arm to watch in the Cardinals system, especially with that changeup.
Neighbors has a medium frame with limited physical projection. He throws from a high slot and has a vertically oriented arsenal in his four-seam fastball and curveball. His heater sat 93-96 mph and touched 98 each time I saw him this spring. Neighbors’ fastball displays plus riding life when it’s in the upper half of the zone, but he worked at the knees seemingly as often as he attempted to elevate, and the life on the pitch isn’t as explosive down there. Neighbors’ curveball is a 81-85 mph 12-to-6 downer with sharp break that plays well against left-handed hitters because of the vertical nature of its shape. He’ll also mix in a short cutter at 88-91 mph to give hitters another look. In 2023, Neighbors struck out an absurd 46.7% of the batters he faced, while this year he struck out 36.5%. Neighbors’ walk rate ticked up to 11.4% this year after he limited free passes (8.7% walk rate) in 2023. Neighbors’ control has always significantly outpaced his command, and if he’s able to keep the walks in check, he could move quickly through the minors. He has the potential to be a high-leverage type. He agreed to a $600,000 deal, slightly below slot.
Shojinaga was a draft-eligible sophomore who I’ve had a front seat to for the past couple of years as he’s played at Kansas. Shojinaga has advanced bat-to-ball ability, which is reflected in his sub-10% in-zone whiff rate this season, and he posted a .335/.402/.485 slash on the year. He projects for well-below-average game power, but his line drive and gap-to-gap approach will produce a significant number of doubles.
The question with Shojinaga is and has always been where he’s going to play on the defensive side of the ball. The Phillies announced him as a catcher, which is the position he played in high school and in fall scrimmages each year that he was on campus, but it’s always been pretty shaky back there and he only appeared at catcher in one game in his two years of college ball. He has average arm strength, and both his receiving and blocking ability currently grade out as well below average. He’s primarily alternated between second and third base, but the hands and footwork is going to have to take a big step forward in pro ball for him to be a passable defender at either spot.
Shojinaga’s hit tool gives him a shot, but he’ll need to find a way to become a passable defender at a position that can support his below-average power profile. I don’t think that will be at his announced position of catcher. Shojinaga recently signed with the Phillies for $257,500.
Powell won the 2024 National Junior College Player of the Year award at Seminole State, a longtime Oklahoma junior college powerhouse. In his 253 plate appearances this spring, Powell had 56 total extra-base hits (1.088 SLG), including 32 homers, and hit .502 on the season while playing shortstop for the Trojans. Powell is a premium athlete who still has significant frame-based projection and he’s going to a club that has arguably had the most success in plucking under-the-radar Midwest junior college players who later find their way to the big leagues.
Powell was drafted as a shortstop, but in my in-person looks at him this year, I thought he profiled better in center field because his actions at short can occasionally get rigid and his hands aren’t plus. Powell has an aggressive approach at the plate and there will be some swing-and-miss in his game, but the pure athleticism and bat speed he brings to the table are a good foundation to build on. Regardless of where he ends up on the defensive spectrum, you’re buying the bat and overall athleticism with Powell. The comp I have on him as he enters pro ball involves another former prospect from the state of Oklahoma: Lane Adams. The Astros and Powell agreed on an over-slot bonus of $422,500. He’s a high-variance position player to watch in Houston’s system
Jones walked (55) more than he struck out (51) for Kansas State in 2024 on his way to posting a .303/.442/.500 line as the Wildcats’ everyday center fielder. Jones has a very flat bat path through the zone, but also whips the bat through the zone with above-average bat speed. Barring a major swing change, Jones’ path and approach aren’t going to yield much home run value, but his current cut is very conducive to spraying hard line drives to all fields.
Jones shouldn’t have any problem staying in center field long-term, as his plus speed allows him to cover both gaps even though he has a tendency to set up very deep in center. Despite not being a highly projectable prospect, Jones’ ability to both stick at a premium position and make himself a pesky out in the batter’s box gives him a viable path to being a role player. The Yankees inked Jones to a $150,000 signing bonus and he’ll likely join an affiliate soon.
Salinas is a left-handed pitcher with plus athleticism out of Cowley College, a JUCO in Kansas that has produced the likes of Travis Hafner, Junior Spivey, and Trevor Rosenthal. Salinas is a very good athlete with a lean frame. Notable hip-shoulder separation in his delivery really allows you to project on his fastball velocity. His fastball sat 88-91 mph, and depending on which start you caught this spring, you could see him touching 93 or 87 mph on either side of that range. Salinas’ curveball is the biggest eye-catcher in the mix. It ranges between 70-77 mph, has an extraordinary amount of depth, and varies between a 12-to-6 and 1-to-7 shape. He also threw a rarely used changeup at 77-81 that tended to lack notable action.
Salinas’ command was usually well below average and unless something drastically improves with that, he’s almost certainly destined for a relief role. There’s more meat on the bone when it comes to Salinas’ frame and the velocity on his fastball. He’s a fun arm for the O’s development team, but they have a tall task in front of them in terms of improving Salinas’ strike throwing ability. Salinas and the Orioles reached agreement on a $150,000 bonus prior to the signing deadline.
