I've already ranked the draft prospects for this year's draft based on how good I think they will be, so this article points to players who I'm higher on than many other outlets/scouts/teams -- and lets me explain why. In other cases, it's focusing on players I've seen often and have a good feeling that they'll find success, or who have really convinced the scouts I trust most. Here are the players I'm most excited about in this year's draft.
The headliner
To get you into the swing of things, let's call out my fifth-ranked player, Max Clark. I think the casual draft fan assumes the fifth-best player won't have five-WAR upside, but that's why this draft is considered the best in at least a decade, led by the elite top five. Clark has a lot of parallels to NL Rookie of the Year candidate Corbin Carroll of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
It's important to note the actual chances of comps like this becoming real. Using some empirical outcomes of different tiers of top prospects and adapting them to Clark, let's call it a 35% chance he's at the level of perennial All-Star (3.5+ annual WAR, roughly), 35% he's a solid to good everyday player (2 to 3.5 WAR), and a 30% chance he's a sometimes-regular, good backup, or worse. That might not sound like good odds for a top-of-the-draft success, but that kind of player gets a bonus of $6-8 million in the draft and is immediately worth something like $50 million in trade value the day he signs, using some of the math I use to value farm systems.
The Kiley guys
I've developed a track record for picking my guy in each draft -- it usually comes wherever the biggest gap between what I think vs. others, combined with conviction about my projection. They've unintentionally ended up being the same kind of player -- shorter-limbed, up-the-middle, polished, hit-first college players who come with some defensive value and markers for continued improvement -- indicating that I think the industry is still too low on this sort of prospect.
I had Tyler Black in 2021 and Drew Gilbert in 2022, both of whom fit that description perfectly. Both have also shown exactly the improvement I expected -- Gilbert, the 28th overall pick last summer, is top 100 quality already, and Black is knocking on the door.
So, when I started the process a year ago looking for my guy for the 2023 draft, I found myself unintentionally gravitating to the same kind of player again. My main guy this year is Pennsylvania infielder Kevin McGonigle. He's a shorter-limbed, hit-first, productive, up-the-middle, polished player just like Black and Gilbert.
This will play on the broadcast when he gets picked, but wanted to include it here. It's a slo-mo of my top pick to click of the draft Kevin McGonigle at 960 frames per second. More on why he's my pick is coming tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/qVRgbWWkgy
— Kiley McDaniel (@kileymcd) July 8, 2023
I thought during that McGonigle's dominating performance in the batter's box would be enough to make him a consensus top-10 pick, despite being an average-at-best runner and a likely second baseman -- a relatively similar profile got Termarr Johnson taken fourth overall in 2022 -- but scouts didn't really agree. McGonigle didn't face much top competition this spring, so the evaluation is basically unchanged: McGonigle is the best bet from the prep class to make the big leagues behind the obvious two of Walker Jenkins and Clark.
I see a .280 hitter with 15 to 20 homers, playing a solid second or third base, something in the ballpark of Andres Gimenez, and I don't think he'll go in the top-20 picks Contrasting McGonigle with Clark (who I gave 35-35-30 odds), I'd say McGonigle's odds of perennial All-Star are 15%, solid regular 25%, and sometimes-regular or worse 60%. There are lots of useful players in that last group -- imagine a player who starts for a few years, becomes a valuable multi-positional bat, etc. -- so I read those odds as a little better than a coinflip that you're getting a big leaguer who matters.
Georgia prep center fielder Drew Burress is another player of this type. He's a plus runner, grinder and center fielder who is 5-foot-9, but has that wiry, compact, twitchy bat speed and enough strength that no scouts wonder if the bat will get knocked out of his hands. Start with Myles Straw, then add more power. He should go by pick 50, but I'm not sure there are enough teams on board with my approach on these two to take them where they should.
The quick risers
The gap between what I think and how teams draft is smaller here, so it's more of a good feeling that things will work out for Colin Houck and Bryce Eldridge. Houck is an SEC-level quarterback prospect who's chosen baseball full-time -- he looks to me like Evan Longoria. He's a fine shortstop with a slight limitation to his range on step three or four, so he would fit perfectly as an above average defensive third baseman.
His outlier skill, which I noticed after taking countless slow-motion videos of his swing (he plays 15 minutes from my house), is staying inside the ball on literally every swing, never locking out his elbows or trying to hook/pull the ball. This makes it hard for him to pull and lift hard stuff on his hands, but that adjustment is one of the more teachable ones: Josh Jung figured it out within about a year of signing out of Texas Tech.
Eldridge has among the best contact rates over the summer, so you might be thinking "Oh, Kiley's pitching another short-armed contact-oriented guy." Nope! Eldridge is 6-foot-7 and has the power for 30 to 35 homers, too. And he is a second-round talent on the mound, with a mid-90's heater and above-to-plus slider when he's solid. He's told teams he'll only sign if he gets to do both, so he might slide down the board.
I'm in on Eldridge because of the rarity of a long-limbed contact hitter with huge power, but also the multiyear track record of playing both ways -- picking one or the other is a pretty good backup plan in case I totally whiff on one of those evaluations. It also seems like the number of 6-foot-6 or taller standout hitters is increasing with Aaron Judge being joined by Oneil Cruz, Elly De La Cruz, Spencer Jones, James Wood and now Eldridge. None of these is a perfect match for Eldridge, but Jones feels the most similar.
The sleepers
I'll be brief here, but these three players appeal to me for different reasons. Colt Emerson is one of the better bets to hit from the prep class and has markers for growth: young for the class, cold-weather, table-pounding evaluations from scouts I trust. As a player, he's similar to Jacob Gonzalez. George Lombard Jr. is the son of a big leaguer with five average or better tools, physical projection and plus makeup raves from everyone I've spoken with. The recent version of Brandon Drury could be similar to where he ends up.
Walker Martin is a simple upside play with a huge risk. One part of that risk is he hasn't played many summer events, thus a short track record against elite pitching -- was the only ding against Jackson Merrill in the 2021 draft. I -- along with most teams -- couldn't see past that with Merrill and notice that everything else was near ideal.
Martin is older than some of the high school players in this draft at almost 19½, but there's a super important distinction to be made about that. Instead of just applying a one-size-fit-all adjustment to every older player -- as most front offices currently do -- teams should create a scoring system based on the underlying factors and adjust each player on their board uniquely for their age.
It's super notable that Martin has literally none of the markers that underlie the studies that these teams are taking as gospel. He isn't a maxed-out unathletic player, he isn't in a warm weather state getting tons of year-round reps, he isn't bolstering his rep by beating up on younger pitchers and he's been playing multiple sports all of high school. That résumé also happens to match another guy who was discounted due to being 19 on draft day: Colson Montgomery, who slid into the middle of the first round due almost entirely to his age, is now a top-15 prospect.
The late bloomer
I am fascinated by a few things about Nolan Schanuel. Most scouts I've spoken with are saying he is the best overall hitter they've seen this spring. What that means is that they would pick him over Dylan Crews and Wyatt Langford. He's got outstanding numbers at a mid-major, but he's not what I refer to as an NFL combine athlete in any way. His bat speed and foot speed are just OK amongst first-rounders, but his feel for the game and ability to get the most out of his skills is uncanny. Maybe the rosiest outcome is Anthony Rizzo. Let's go to the odds, which are similar to McGonigle's: I'd put the likelihood that Schanuel becomes a perennial All-Star (i.e Rizzo's career) at the same as McGonigle, 15%, a slightly higher chance of solid regular status at 30% (due to his college background), and sometimes regular or worse at 55%.
On top of that, Schanuel was in the 2020 pandemic-affected Florida prep class. It included Sterlin Thompson, who went in the first round last year and is already an arrow-up in pro ball, and four likely first-rounders this year: Crews, Enrique Bradfield Jr., Yohandy Morales and Brock Wilken.
Schanuel, Thompson and Wilken are the latest in a line of Florida middle-of-the-state corner-only hitters with power-over-hit profiles going to college at an eye-popping rate considering the prices they could have been signed for out of high school. There's a more recent example in South Carolina rising sophomore Ethan Petry (an easy top half of the first-round talent now), and a historical one in Pete Alonso. After they go unnoticed out of high school, their prices tend to skyrocket by draft time, or in Alonso's case during his big league career.
I can't totally explain why this is happening. It could just be that Florida is always loaded, so it will have more players who emerge as big prospects later in their careers and that group is more obviously affected by the 2020 shortened spring. There could also be a weird overexposure where if these players popped up in the Northeast during the spring, they might very well be seen as having more ability and potential than being well-known players in Florida where everyone has seen their ups and downs. Either way, it could be a very good thing for Schanuel.
The up-and-comers
Lastly, my favorite discovery of the MLB draft combine was Hawaiian prep OF Devin Saltiban, who also has been performing well in the MLB Draft League. Saltiban, Colton Coates, Ethan Mendoza and Jatnk Diaz are all high school players with some buzz who look to raise their status in a significant way. I was skeptical when the league started and it's still best for a $200,000 bonus worthy player to turn into a $400,000 to $500,000 bonus player, but that level that lesser-known players can get to is now relevant to me and to teams.