Guardians stockpile college bats in 2025 MLB Draft, take Jace LaViolette with first-round pick

New York Times

2 days ago

CLEVELAND — It's a little different having the 27th pick in the MLB Draft from owning the top selection with the largest bonus pool in league history.
Last year, the Cleveland Guardians could evaluate every prospect, knowing they could draft anyone they wanted with the No. 1 pick, the benefit of a fortunate bounce of ping-pong balls for a club that had a 2 percent chance of landing the top spot.
Advertisement
After a 92-win season, the Guardians wound up with the No. 27 pick in the 2025 draft. Yet, they still made a decision with that pick that should pique the interest of the Cleveland fans.
The Guardians drafted Texas A&M outfielder Jace LaViolette with their first choice Sunday night. He's a 6-foot-6, 240-pound outfielder with power and athleticism to make scouts salivate. Earlier this year, his name surfaced in chatter about the No. 1 pick.
'He's a massive guy,' said Paul Gillispie, the Guardians' senior vice president of scouting. 'Speed, power, patience.'
So why did he fall to the end of the first round? That's the part that should have Guardians fans glued to his journey in the coming years.
Let's start here: The Guardians have been working for years to solve their hitting development riddle. They have had profound struggles in the outfield, in particular, for more than a decade. LaViolette is the seventh outfielder they have selected with their first pick in the last 14 drafts. That time stretches back to 2012, when they tabbed Tyler Naquin — another left-handed-hitting outfielder from Texas A&M — with the No. 12 pick.
They took Clint Frazier in 2013, then Bradley Zimmer in 2014. They went with Will Benson in 2016 and Quentin Holmes in 2017 (in the second round, since they coughed up their top pick to sign Edwin Encarnacion). They drafted Chase DeLauter at No. 16 three years ago, and he's finally on the cusp of the majors, but injuries keep interfering with his progress.
In March, The Athletic's Keith Law ranked LaViolette the No. 7 prospect on his big board, but he wrote: 'I don't know about this one. LaViolette has the power to go 1-1, but there's a mixed camp on whether he stays in center, and he struck out 81 times (24.2 percent) last spring, an unthinkable number and rate for a top-10 pick. … It's a high-risk, high-reward package — we haven't seen guys whiff this much in college and end up good big-league hitters.'
With the 27th pick in the 1st round, we have selected OF Jace LaViolette from Texas A&M University.
In 188 games at the college level, Jace slashed .285/.432/.651 with 68 HR and 202 RBI.#GuardsBall pic.twitter.com/m6Q87YZ0E0
— Cleveland Guardians (@CleGuardians) July 14, 2025
LaViolette is Texas A&M's all-time leader in home runs (68) and walks (169). He slugged 29 homers in 68 games as a sophomore in 2024, and compiled a .305/.449/.726 slash line.
His output dipped in 2025, though, to .258/.427/.576. He slipped to the No. 24 spot on Law's big board before the draft, with Law projecting that 'his dismal performance this spring ended (talk of going first) and probably pushed him to the back of the first round or beyond.'
Advertisement
The primary issue? As Law noted, his whiff rate on pitches in the zone is concerning.
'He has no load in his approach,' Law wrote earlier this month, 'making very hard contact because he's extremely strong and has enough hand speed to get the bat going in time to catch up to good velocity, with a hard-hit rate on the year of 53 percent. He does know the strike zone well enough to see solid OBPs with power, likely pulled down by a low batting average and probably a strikeout rate above 25 percent when he gets to Double A. … If you think you can solve some of his in-zone miss, whether it's by adjusting his swing to give him a load and some more rhythm or if you think it's about pitch recognition, he does have 30-homer upside.'
That last sentence is the key, and it falls upon an organization that has reached an inflection point when it comes to hitting development. The Guardians are widely regarded as one of the model franchises for pitching development, but they have yet to replicate those processes on the position player side. LaViolette might be the right case study to evaluate their progress. Can they remedy what ailed him this past season at Texas A&M and guide him toward being the hitter who was once drawing consideration for the top pick?
'His upside is obviously quite high,' Gillispie said. 'I don't know if I would characterize it as extreme value. I'd say he's a player who does a lot of things really well, and I think if you take those things that he does and bring him into an environment like ours and get him around our people, our resources, I think the potential upside for him is really high. In some ways, it's unknowable exactly how good he can be.'
They could certainly use more power in the system. Cleveland's top prospects list is filled with hitters — DeLauter, CJ Kayfus, Ralphy Velazquez, Angel Genao, Cooper Ingle, Jaison Chourio and, of course, Travis Bazzana, last year's No. 1 pick — but none has the power potential that LaViolette wields. How else do you wind up with the nickname 'Lord Tubbington'? The last six years (including the first half of this season), the Guardians have ranked 27th, 12th, 29th, 30th, 12th and 20th in home runs among the league's 30 teams.
Advertisement
Despite his skepticism about LaViolette's path forward, consider Law a proponent of the pick, given where in the draft it occurred. Law joked he wanted to build a time machine and tell Cleveland's brass in February that it would land LaViolette with its first-rounder.
'This guy was supposed to go top 10, and he's at 27, but he's not hurt or any different,' Law wrote Sunday night. 'He just had a bad year when the whole team around him fell apart. You have to think you can improve his swing decisions and probably clean up the swing.'
In all, the Guardians made five selections on Day 1 of the draft. Four of them are 21-year-old position players.
No. 27: Jace LaViolette, LHH OF, Texas A&M
No. 64: Dean Curley, RHH SS, Tennessee
No. 66: Aaron Walton, RHH OF, Arizona
No. 70: Will Hynes, RHP, Lorne Park Secondary School in Ontario
No. 101: Nolan Schubart, RHH OF, Oklahoma State
Curley was ranked No. 34 on Law's big board, thanks to an 'excellent feel to hit with a simple swing that gets the ball in the air, although as the season went on, he started to have more trouble picking up off-speed stuff from the better pitching in the SEC. … He's not a shortstop and probably has his best shot to stay on the dirt at third base.'
Want to feel old? Hynes was born July 7, 2007. Maybe it's meant to be that someone born on 07/07/07 was taken with pick No. 70. Gillispie said he's confident the team can sign him away from his Wake Forest commitment.
Walton, a 6-foot-3 center fielder, transferred from Samford ahead of his junior year. Schubart, who stands 6 feet 5, is another outfielder (for now) with mega pop — he hit 59 homers in three years in Stillwater, Okla. — and a concerning strikeout rate.
As for LaViolette, he suffered a broken hand during an SEC tournament game in late May and had surgery that night. He played the next day. Gillispie said LaViolette recently underwent another procedure to clean up and reinforce the initial operation, and said the Guardians have no concern about the injury.