How Scouting Departments Grade The 2025 MLB Draft Class


Image credit: (Photo by Eddie Kelly / Baseball America)
For the fifth 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.
2025 MLB Draft Rankings
See our latest big board and in-depth scouting reports for the 2025 draft class.
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 (3) than who view it as below-average (1), but the bulk of the industry (8) who responded sees this as an average draft class. Grading the overall class as average was the largest majority response of this year’s poll.
Impact Talent
Average Grade: 45
Range: 40-50
Majority: 40/50 split
The industry is torn on the impact talent of the class, with half seeing it as average and half seeing it as below-average. There is a clear group of players at the top of the class currently—including Jace LaViolette, Ethan Holliday, Jamie Arnold, Tyler Bremner and Seth Hernandez—but each player has their flaws. There’s not an Adley Rutschman or Dylan Crews type headliner currently.
Overall Depth
Average Grade: 56
Range: 50-60
Majority: 60
This is the strongest individual category of this year’s draft according to our experts. While this 56 grade doesn’t quite reach the plus depth grades received by the post-pandemic drafts (2021-2023) it is above-average and the loudest “tool” of the class as it stands currently.
College Pitching
Average Grade: 49
Range: 40-60
Plurality: 40
While a plurality of directors (5) view the college pitching crop as below-average, there are enough who view the college arms as plus (4) or average (3) to push the class up to an average grade in the aggregate. Top-of-the-class arms Tyler Bremner and Jamie Arnold don’t have the electricity that Chase Burns and Hagen Smith boasted a year ago, but they have safer starting profiles at the same time. There is no shortage of college arms who look like roughly third-round talents at the moment but could use a strong season to boost their stock on draft day.
College Hitting
Average Grade: 50
Range: 40-60
Plurality: 50
Half the directors viewed the college hitting class as average, while the other half was torn between plus or below-average. There is plenty of power in this year’s class (which could be a function of college baseball’s overheated offensive environment) but there are fewer pure hitters of the caliber of the likes of Travis Bazzana, JJ Wetherholt and Nick Kurtz.
High School Pitching
Average Grade: 48
Range: 40-60
Majority: 40/50 split
The high school pitching crop narrowly loses out to college pitching for the worst individually-graded section of the draft. But it still rounds to an average class overall with a handful (2) of directors being a bit more bullish and slapping a plus grade on the group. Righthander Seth Hernandez is a headliner who matches the likes of Dylan Lesko, Jackson Jobe and Andrew Painter of recent years, but Kruz Schoolcraft might be the only other no-doubt prep first-round pitching talent right now.
High School Hitting
Average Grade: 52
Range: 40-60
Plurality: 50
Directors view the high school hitting demographic as the strongest of the four, with half the directors calling it an average class, four calling it plus and just two calling it below-average. There’s both quality and quantity, with lots of shortstop capital to be found inside the first round, though Ethan Holliday doesn’t quite reach the sort of elite Bobby Witt Jr. status as a standout high school headliner.
In Conclusion
Here’s how the 2025 class stacks up when we put all the grades together and round each category to the nearest half-grade:
Overall: 50 (average)
Impact: 45 (fringe-average)
Depth: 55 (above-average)
College Pitching: 50 (average)
College Hitting: 50 (average)
High School Pitching: 50 (average)
High School Hitting: 50 (average)
While the 2024 class doesn’t yet have the sort of top-of-the-class talent to get the industry fired up, it is a well-rounded and deep group of players with no clear weakness.
At the same time as a year ago, the 2025 group is definitely ahead of a 2024 class that was viewed as fringe-average with overall and impact talent and just average in depth. That class also featured both high school demographics with below-average grades.
The 2025 draft joins the 2023 class as only the second in our five years of this exercise to not have a single demographic below a 50—though directors gave both the college and high school hitters 55s, while the 2025 class is straight 50s across the board.
While the 2025 class seems to have enough talent to keep teams busy on all three two days of the draft, scouts will be looking for a handful of players to take a step forward and cement themselves as no-doubt top-of-the-class headliners on draft day.
You can compare and contrast the 2024 class with previous draft classes below: