I spent all of last week on the road in South Carolina and Georgia, seeing MLB Draft prospects, including at least three likely first-rounders and maybe nine players who’ll go in the top two rounds. The group was highlighted by one of best prospects in the entire class, Georgia Tech catcher Vahn Lackey.
Lackey has had a breakout season for the Yellow Jackets, pushing himself into the top echelon of prospects in this year’s draft class as he was No. 2 on my latest rankings. I saw him for a game on Thursday night against Florida State, where he showed a little of everything that makes him that kind of top-tier talent.
Lackey is an excellent athlete with above-average speed out of the box. He’s played third base as well as behind the dish, although his highest potential value is as a catcher. He’s a solid blocker and receiver who’s agile and moves well back there. He has an 80 arm (on the 20-80 scale) that would obviously let him play third base or in the outfield if someone wanted to move him to get his bat in the lineup more. I saw one in-game throw where he nailed a runner at second with a 1.75 second pop time, which is about as good as it gets.
The bat is pretty special, too, as he’s hitting .398/.519/.789 through the weekend with a team-leading 12 homers and improved batted-ball quality over last year. He’s a disciplined hitter who’s whiffed on 16 percent of his swings this year — just 9 percent on fastballs — and he’s chased pitches well out of the zone only 12 percent of the time, helping him walk more than he’s struck out on the season. There’s some extraneous movement at the start of his swing, with a big leg move backwards, but he finishes in a balanced spot that lets him get power from his hips as well as his hands.
He’s even continued hitting against better competition in ACC play, with a .354/.488/.723 line and nearly identical whiff and chase rates. Athletic catchers with value on both sides of the ball like this are extremely hard to find in college or high school, and of course, a player who can do both at that position has a chance to be one of the most valuable players in baseball.
I don’t see Lackey getting out of the top five picks, and I think he’s passed all of the other college hitters in the class except for UCLA shortstop Roch Cholowsky.
Georgia Tech outfielder Drew Burress has taken a step back in his draft season. (Petre Thomas / Imagn Images)
Outfielder Drew Burress came into the spring as Georgia Tech’s top prospect, with 45 homers in his first two years as a Yellow Jacket, but he’s having his worst year in college so far, with his power way down from his underclass seasons. He’s hitting a very respectable .333/.472/.589, but he’s probably going to have his lowest home-run total (he’s at seven and we’re past the midpoint), and questions about his size and potential impact are only going to become more significant because of these middling results.
He’s posted exit velocities up to 110 mph this year, but he’s lunging now and getting his front foot down later, sometimes an instant before contact. He’s also swinging and missing slightly more, especially on breaking stuff, without the greater production or even contact quality to mitigate it. He could be pressing a little in his draft year, which could make him a good value pick who’ll be available a little lower in the draft than expected.
Second baseman Jarren Advincula transferred to Georgia Tech from Cal, close to where he grew up in Santa Clara, and he’s in the midst of his best season, with a .422/.494/.599 line and only 12 strikeouts in 171 PA (7 percent). He’s a 70 runner who takes a swing-first-and-ask-questions-later approach that works because he whiffs just 12 percent of the time. It’s a flatter swing that puts the ball on the ground half the time, which probably undersells his power potential, as he has solid-average contact quality, just not enough in the air. He projects to go in the top two rounds.
Georgia Tech shortstop Carson Kerce — that’s an ‘r’, they’re not related, stop it — also hits the ball on the ground too often, and he doesn’t have Advincula’s overall strength. That said, he has very good bat-to-ball skills and is reasonably disciplined, giving him enough of an offensive package to make him a good bet to be a utility infielder in the big leagues with everyday ceiling at shortstop. He’s a 60 runner as well, maybe a 65; I saw him beat out a grounder to short with a sub-4 second run time on a slight jailbreak. He also stayed on a late-tumbling changeup from Florida State lefty Wes Mendes to line it to left for a soft single. He’s a Day 1 pick, probably in the third-round range right now.
That game was the first time I’ve seen a fight in the stands at a college game. A Georgia Tech fan — probably a student, just based on his age — poured a beer over a woman in Florida State gear who was older than I am, at which point her husband stood up and started punching the instigator. Tech fans followed by pelting the husband with beer cans and cups; as far as I could see, all three of them were removed from the park, with the GT fan getting high fives on the way out. Not a great look for the Wreck.
I moved on from Atlanta to Athens for the first two games of the Florida-Georgia series, with Gators junior righty Liam Peterson bumped to Saturdays to make way for sophomore ace Aidan King on Friday. Peterson responded with his first zero-walk outing of the year, throwing 70 percent of his pitches for strikes in seven innings, allowing just one run and striking out four.
Peterson’s seven-inning outing against Georgia was the longest of his collegiate career. He has a 3.60 ERA in 45 innings this season.
Peterson’s fastball was 96-98 mph in the first inning, then 93-98 over the course of the game. He also threw a slider up to 88 that was plus when he landed it, a low-80s curveball and a straight changeup at 86-88. He got ahead with the fastball, which is firm but doesn’t miss many bats, and leaned heavily on the slider after that. He probably could stand to use the changeup a little more against lefties.
He’s very online to the plate, coming from a high three-quarters slot with a medium-short arm action and plenty of arm speed. He should throw strikes like this, and if he can improve his command within the upper half of the zone, he’s at least a mid-rotation starter. Granted, I got the best version of him in this outing; two weeks earlier, he walked six against Arkansas, and this was his first college appearance of more than two innings where he didn’t walk a single batter.
King started for Florida on Friday and was perfect through six, giving up a hit on a first-pitch fastball to start the seventh, and he didn’t walk a batter until the eighth. He was in command, literally and figuratively, the whole game, sitting 91-95 and working to the edges of the zone. Out of 107 total pitches, he threw just five in the middle-middle section of the strike zone (divided into a 3×3 grid) the entire game, according to Synergy’s data.
King’s slider was a 55, sitting at 83-86 but playing up because he located it so well, burying it under left-handed batters’ hands for an impossible-to-hit pitch. His changeup was also above-average, even though it’s up to 87 and thus not that far below his fastball velocity-wise.
He doesn’t have a true plus pitch or giant velocity, which is a de facto requirement to go in the first round, but this kind of command and feel to pitch is unusual in an amateur. Even if he doesn’t improve his stuff next year when he’s draft-eligible, some smart team is going to take him and let their pitching lab have a field day.
Georgia started right-hander Joey Volchko on Friday night and he was also quite good. It was his best start in SEC play so far this season, going six innings with seven strikeouts, two hits, two walks and three hit-batters. OK, that last part wasn’t great. He was 94-97 with a wild delivery that has limbs flying everywhere and a head-whack at release, but somehow he stays online, and other than landing wobbly on that front ankle on some pitches he was consistent enough to get to average-ish control.
He loves to throw his upper-80s slider at the left-handed batter’s box, even though he is capable of throwing it at the inside corner to righties, and his low-80s curveball has some power and bite to it so it looks harder than its velocity. He doesn’t have a changeup or splitter, but he has no platoon split this year despite that.
All three pitches that he does have move quite a bit; the fastball is practically a cutter, while his slider has a ton of horizontal movement to it, and might technically be a sweeper. It’s a plus pitch by shape, but he can’t command it, with the pitch landing in the zone a little over a quarter of the time. I had him 43rd in my latest rankings, which puts him in the second round, and I think that adequately reflects the relief risk here given the lack of a weapon for lefties and his issues commanding his very good breaking stuff.
The hitters in the series were a little disappointing, with Florida’s Brendan Lawson — a top prospect for 2027 — missing Friday’s game and only DHing on Saturday, when he went 0 for 2 with two walks. Florida center fielder Kyle Jones showed plus range and took good routes, with close to 70 speed, but he struck out three times on sliders. Ethan Surowiec, the Gators’ third baseman, has a better swing and hit a couple of balls at 104+ on Friday before a three-strikeout day on Saturday. He adjusted better to sliders than Jones did, facing the same pitching.
Georgia catcher Daniel Jackson is now hitting .385/.480/.790 with 16 homers on the season, and I think the bat is real — he has a good swing, quick hands and definite power — while the glove is … I guess imaginary? He struggled with blocking and throwing, and at one point let a 94-mph fastball in the zone glance off his glove and go to the backstop with runners on.
Georgia has two of the better seniors in the class in infielder Tre Phelps, who has probably 70 raw power and solid contact skills but no position and too much propensity to chase, and right-hander Dylan Vigue, a transfer from Michigan who gets a lot of life on his 91-94 mph fastball that comes from a very low slot, with fringe-average secondaries.
Joseph Contreras got to pitch on a big stage this spring, competing for Team Brazil in the World Baseball Classic. (Kenneth Richmond / Getty Images)
High school right-hander Joseph Contreras pitched for Brazil in the World Baseball Classic, then returned to Blessed Trinity Catholic High School (Roswell, Ga.), where his dad, Jose Contreras, is one of the coaches. I saw him pitch in a tournament in West Ashley, S.C., right outside of Charleston, last week. Contreras showed six pitches — I am shocked, shocked I tell you — with 40 command at best.
He was up to 97 on the four-seamer and 92-93 on the two-seamer, with a splitter, a changeup, a slider and a cutter. The splitter is plus. The velocity on his heater is also plus, although the four-seamer is way too straight, and he had several three-ball counts where he couldn’t or wouldn’t throw it for a strike. He walked five in five innings and didn’t dominate hitters like someone with his arsenal should.
Contreras does look the part, standing 6-foot-4 with some projection, and it’s easy to see him and envision a career like his father’s. He has to show he can throw more strikes, though.
Shortstop Taj Marchand of James Island (S.C.) Charter HS was also in that tournament, and I caught him on Monday to open the trip, in a game where he homered the other way and played excellent defense at third base after their regular there got hurt. I don’t love how his swing works, as he leaks over his front side and it can be very inside-out, but he hit the ball hard twice, including that homer, and has a history of high contact rates.
The look at third base was fortuitous since the consensus is he’s not sticking at shortstop. He made several difficult plays on short hops, as if he’d been playing that position his whole life. He’s committed to Mississippi and won’t turn 18 until after the draft.
Outfielder Trevor Condon of Etowah High School (Cherokee County, Ga.), projects to go in the top two rounds. He has good bat speed and a high probability to stick in center field. He keeps his hands pretty high and seems to want the ball up. He opened the game with a long home run out to right on the first pitch, and later flew out close to the warning track on a pitch he didn’t actually hit that hard, both on pitches up in the zone. I only saw above-average speed from him, and he played well in center until he had to come out of the game after a collision with the left fielder.
Shortstop Aiden Ruiz of the Stony Brook School (Long Island, N.Y.) was No. 24 on my most recent rankings thanks to reports that he’s gotten stronger since last summer. He’s still undersized, but there’s a good chance he’ll have enough strength to make his extraordinary contact rates work. He’s a definite shortstop with easy actions. At the plate, he showed a very advanced approach, hitting one ball hard while running deep counts every time up. There’s some limit to his ceiling given his size; he’s taller than Burress, though, and I think he’s at least 10 pounds above his listed weight (168 pounds).
I ended my trip with a rare home game, as Missouri State visited Delaware for a weekend series — a benefit (to me) of Delaware moving up to Conference USA. MSU center fielder Caden Bogenpohl is a Day 1 prospect this year thanks to his ability to make very hard contact. He has cut down somewhat on his swing-and-miss issues from last year, but I saw a lot of swing and miss in my look at him. Striking out three times swinging against Delaware on a Sunday isn’t really the ideal look for a hitter, and Bogenpohl showed he still has trouble with anything that’s not a fastball. He did put the ball in play twice, with one very hard-hit single.
I had him right at the back of my top 50 last week, and he’ll be lower in future rankings, as he’s still having these contact issues even though he’s not facing SEC- or ACC-level pitching.
