What We’re Hearing About The 2025 MLB Draft: Jace LaViolette vs. Ethan Holliday For No. 1 & More

The Debate At No. 1

One question I’ve been asking essentially every scout I talk to is: “Who do you have No. 1?”

If you’ve already looked at our draft update, you probably know the most frequent answer to that question. Texas A&M outfielder Jace LaViolette is the new leader of the class and seems like the best fit for the honor at the moment given his well-rounded profile and a down summer from Oklahoma high school shortstop Ethan Holliday, who checks in at No. 2.

Most evaluators seem to have LaViolette and Holliday in their top tier no matter the order, but I have spoken with scouts on the lower end who view Holliday as more of a middle-of-the-first round or back-of-the-top-10 prospect. I haven’t heard that feedback much at all for LaViolette.

LaViolette’s 1-1 case is simple: He’s a physical, 6-foot-5, 220-pound lefthanded-hitting outfielder who combines standout athleticism with a loud toolset and two years of impressive production in college baseball’s stiffest conference. The 20-year-old is a .297/.433/.683 hitter with Texas A&M, has homered at least 20 times in each of his first two seasons, has tremendous exit velocity data (108.8 90th percentile EV in 2024) and raw power, is a shockingly good runner for his size and plays center field well enough to perhaps stick there at the next level.

“He is a freak athlete,” said one scout. 

His pure contact skills are likely the one area that holds LaViolette back from being the consensus No. 1 player in the class at this stage. He has struck out at a 25.4% clip in his first two seasons, which would be an extremely high mark for the first college hitter off the board. Scouts are confident he’ll improve that mark during his draft season next spring and cite a strong batting eye (20% chase rate in college) that could help him do it. For now, that’s his one real question mark, and he’ll need to improve on his 71% overall contact rate.

Holliday entered the summer as the top player in the class, and there are still some scouts who view him in that light. But he didn’t have the sort of slam-dunk summer performance to lock him into that spot for the industry at large. Holliday hit .136/.364/.136 in eight games with USA Baseball’s 18U national team and, overall, showed more swing-and-miss than scouts expected or hoped to see. Those miss questions, combined with a defensive profile that is more likely to be on a corner than at shortstop at the next level, have led to a one-spot drop overall for now. 

There’s still plenty to like with Holliday, and he could easily reclaim the top spot in the class by having a Jackson Holliday-esque spring next year with Stillwater High. Holliday’s track record of hitting against the top players in the class is strong, and his combination of physicality, raw power and keen batting eye at the plate give him some of the loudest offensive upside in the class.

“I think he can hit,” said one scout. “He has bloodlines, the makeup, the power, the actions. It’s easy for him. I would have taken him 1-1 if he had been in the 2024 class.” 

West Coast Bias

If you’ve only been scouting in the Eastern half of the country this year, there’s a good chance you don’t have the rosiest picture of the talent of the class. It’s shaping up as a strong year for players on the West Coast and a great year if you’re including players in the western half of the country overall.

On our current top 100, 53 players hail from the western half of the country. As you focus on the top of the class, the West Coast flavor gets even stronger: 18 of the top 30 and seven of the top 10 players in the class come from Western states. 

That concentration of talent is particularly strong for the high school class. Of the 50 high school players ranked in the top 100, 33 (66%) come from Western states compared to 20 (40%) for the college players.

With more premier college baseball programs in the Eastern half of the country and the fact that only 18% of drafted players in 2024 came from the high school level, this “West Coast Bias” of the class might be less obvious on draft day, but scouts will certainly have plenty to watch.

Confidence In Arms Up Top

At the start of the spring for the 2024 class, there wasn’t a single pitcher ranked inside the top 13 spots on the board. Both Chase Burns and Hagen Smith, who eventually pitched their way into the top tier of the class at the second and fifth pick, respectively, started in the middle of the first round at Nos. 15 and 16 on our top 200 list in February.

Burns and Smith had real reliever questions that they answered emphatically throughout the course of the spring season. The top high school pitcher in the class at the time was Cam Caminiti, who fell just behind Burns and Smith at No. 17.

The top-end pitching talent of the 2025 class is starting out in a better spot. Three pitchers rank inside the top five: UC Santa Barbara righthander Tyler Bremner, Florida State lefthander Jamie Arnold and Corona (Calif.) High righthander Seth Hernandez.

Neither of the college arms have the sort of electric stuff that either Burns or Smith boasted, but both come into their draft seasons with significantly better foundations of command and have much higher odds to profile as a starter in pro ball. Bremner ranked as the top prospect on USA Baseball’s college national team this summer and Arnold checked in right behind him at No. 2

Hernandez, meanwhile, is already a better pitching prospect than any of the high school arms in the 2024 class. He is at least as talented as Noble Meyer from the 2023 class and has a chance to be the highest-drafted prep arm since Jackson Jobe was taken third overall in 2021. He has an excellent combination of size, velocity, command, athleticism, feel to spin the ball and an out-pitch changeup that has earned him Dylan Lesko comparisons.

While Lesko has struggled to rediscover his form post-Tommy John surgery in pro ball, leading up to the 2022 draft he was one of the better prep pitching prospects scouts had seen in years. Hernandez probably has the best pure upside of any pitcher in the class at the moment and could be a real dark horse candidate to go first overall. No high school pitcher has gone that high since the lefthanded Brady Aiken in 2014, while there has never been a high school righty selected with the first pick.

Still, no second baseman had been drafted 1-1 until Travis Bazzana was just a few months ago. Never say never.