Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2025 i Baseball America

Before Baseball America’s Draft Preview magazine comes your way in early July … Baseball America digital subscribers can dive into our definitive list of hundreds of the top MLB Draft prospects RIGHT NOW, including full scouting reports. And we’re constantly updating it --if anything develops, you’ll know before anyone else! Check it out at BaseballAmerica.com or scan the QR code below! Follow and never miss out! @BaseballAmerica @BaseballAmerica @BaseballAmerica @BaseballAmerica @BaseballAmericaMag…

Hall of Famers Walter Johnson, Bob Feller and Nolan Ryan were regarded as the hardest throwers of their time, long before the days of omnipresent radar guns. In the past 40 years, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Billy Wagner and Justin Verlander are the most decorated Best Fastball category winners in BA Best Tools voting. But one man stands alone as baseball’s speed king: Aroldis Chapman. Chapman has thrown a pitch faster than 100 mph in 16 straight seasons, a record for the pitch-tracking era. His 98.9 mph average fastball velocity is the fastest among pitchers with at least 500 career innings since 2002, the first year for which velocity data is available at FanGraphs. Chapman combines extreme heat with extreme durability in measures that even past flame-throwing closers…

When Dan Fitzgerald first walked into his office at the University of Kansas in June 2022, the room was mostly bare—no trophies, no glossy recruiting boards, no illusion of inherited momentum. Just a desk and a program in pieces. Kansas had just suffered its sixth losing season since 2010. Its roster was splintering thanks to players exiting through the transfer portal at a high rate. In the weight room, dust settled where energy should’ve been. Empty lockers echoed like warnings. It had been nearly a decade since the Jayhawks last reached the NCAA Tournament, and just five times in the previous 59 years had they earned that opportunity at all. Fitzgerald, fresh off a season as recruiting coordinator at LSU, understood immediately: Tradition wasn’t going to save Kansas. Neither was…

For the fifth straight year, we’ve asked MLB scouting departments to grade the quality of the draft on a 20-80 scale. As part of our preseason All-America balloting, we asked scouting directors how they viewed the strength of the 2025 draft class in an attempt to quantify their opinions on the group and more accurately compare drafts from year to year. Here’s how a dozen scouting directors graded this year’s class: Overall Talent Average Grade: 52 Range: 40–60. Majority: 50. This is the most generic and vague category, which should best capture the overall view of a given draft class. More scouting directors view this class as plus (three) than who view it as below-average (one), but the bulk of responses (eight) see this as an average draft class. Grading…

EXECUTIVE JOCKETTY MADE HIS MARK WITH THREE FRANCHISES General manager Walt Jocketty molded the Cardinals into one of the most successful franchises of the 2000s. St. Louis won the National League pennant in 2004 and then the World Series in 2006. Only the Yankees and Red Sox won more games than the Cardinals from 2000 to 2009. While Jocketty wasn’t running the club in 2008 and 2009, St. Louis continued winning with allstars he had acquired, including Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter. Jocketty is most strongly associated with the Cardinals, but he made his mark in baseball with the Athletics and Reds as well. It was with Oakland in the 1980s that he got his start. Hired as A’s director of minor league operations and scouting…

Eight rookies on MLB Opening Day rosters had the potential to gain Prospect Promotion Incentive eligibility. Reds righthander Rhett Lowder began the season on the major league injured list, giving him a path to PPI eligibility. More on him later. The number of PPI hopefuls climbed to 10 when the Rockies called up righthander Chase Dollander on April 6, but the number fell back to nine about a week later when the Cubs optioned third baseman Matt Shaw to Triple-A. In order for PPI eligibility to attach, a player must accrue at least 172 days of MLB service as a rookie. That requires staying on the active roster—or MLB injured list—all season. Any PPI-eligible player who wins Rookie of the Year or finishes top three for MVP or Cy Young…

• The Tigers got the best of Josue Briceño in the AFL last year. Now, they want to get that production in 2025, while settling on a defensive home. PAGE 31 Bolte Works To Simplify Approach Henry Bolte grew up in Palo Alto attending Athletics games with his father. So when the A’s drafted him in the second round in 2022, it just meant more. While the A’s have moved out of Oakland Coliseum, Bolte is making adjustments to reach the big leagues all the same. Now, the 21-year-old outfielder is working to simplify his approach at the plate. “I’m trying to get to a good hitting position—on time more consistently—and I think that allows you to deliver a good swing on a lot of pitches,” Bolte said after the Spring…

One of the biggest challenges in evaluating international signing classes is how long it takes for players to become productive major leaguers. Teams sign players from Latin America as young as 16, so even a player who reaches the major leagues at age 23 could spend six or seven years in the minor leagues. Players like Juan Soto or Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who reach the majors by age 19 or 20, are rare exceptions. Even then, an MLB debut is just the beginning. At that point, we still don’t know what level of production the player will provide over the next several years of team control. It can take more than a decade to fully evaluate how a team fared in a given international signing class. In the meantime, we…

As a teenager, Ian Miller didn’t have the typical pedigree of a future big leaguer. He had been cut from his seventh grade American Legion team and didn’t make varsity until his junior year of high school. The outfielder was a late bloomer. He was undersized and underdeveloped, but even as he waited to fill out, there was one thing going for him. “I always had speed,” Miller said. “That’s how I didn’t get overlooked. I was able to get my foot in the door.” Miller couldn’t put on a show during batting practice but could when running from home to first. A perfectly placed drag bunt caught the eye of the coaching staff at Wagner, giving Miller the opportunity to walk on to the Staten Island-based program during the…

● Esmerlyn Valdez has rare power in the Pirates’ system. This year, he wants to get to more of it via a more judicious plate approach. PAGE 37 Cabrera Shines Post-Suspension Last year, righthander Jose Cabrera came back from an 80-game PED suspension looking like a different pitcher. In the process, he might have turned himself into the best under-the-radar pitching prospect in the D-backs organization. “I think when you have that much time off, it can be an opportunity where you can use it to get better and work on certain things—or you can sometimes fall behind from it,” D-backs pitching coordinator Kyle Driscoll said. “He chose to get better.” When he was suspended in September 2023 following a positive test for boldenone, Cabrera was operating with a fastball that…

Low-A St. Lucie righthander Raimon Gomez threw the fastest tracked pitch in pro ball this year when he fired a 104.5 mph fastball to strike out Carlos Sanchez on April 26. This wasn’t a one-pitch bolt out of the blue for the 23-year-old Mets prospect. In that same game, Gomez’s fastball sat 101.8 mph and he threw eight pitches 103 mph or harder. To that point in the season, Gomez had thrown seven of the 10 fastest pitches in Statcast-equipped parks—covering MLB, Triple-A and the Florida State League—in 2025. Just two pitches by Athletics closer Mason Miller (103.7 and 103.2 mph) and one by Red Sox closer Aroldis Chapman (103.4) interloped on Gomez’s fastball dominance. This isn’t a shocking development of new-found velocity for Gomez. He showed a great arm…

MLB DEBUTS WITH THEIR SIGNING SCOUTS We highlight the scouts who signed this year’s major league debuts, with this installment covering the months of March and April. An asterisk (*) denotes a player selected in the 2024 Rule 5 draft.…