What to know about the 2025 MLB draft, where Phillies will pick
The Phillies will be on the clock this Sunday.
The team will have a pick in each of the 20 main rounds of Major League Baseball’s upcoming amateur draft, starting with the 26th pick in the first round. This year’s draft will take place over two days, with the first three rounds on Sunday night beginning at 6:30 p.m. Eastern. Rounds 4 through 20 will begin on Monday at 11:30 a.m. Eastern.
The first day of the draft will air on ESPN, MLB Network and MLB.com, while Day 2 will stream only on MLB.com.
Philadelphia will have the 26th, 63rd and 100th overall picks on Sunday. After that, the organization will have the 26th pick of each remaining round.
With the No. 26 pick, the Phillies will actually have the second-to-last pick in the first round, despite there being 30 teams in the majors. The Dodgers, Mets and Yankees all exceeded the second threshold of the luxury tax, so their first picks were pushed back 10 spots into Competitive Balance Round A, which is between the first and second rounds.
It’s not so easy to pick late in the first round, but it’s a requirement for Phillies assistant general manager and head of amateur scouting Brian Barber and his staff when the team is a postseason contender. Barber told reporters Thursday via Zoom he feels that the Phillies have done a good job detecting value in that later range in the last two drafts. They’ll have another opportunity in 2025.
“I still think you can find really good players back on that side of the board, and it’s our job to find them,” Barber said. “That’s just the reality of it. Yes, we want to be picking 30 every year because we won the World Series the previous year. It falls upon us to find the better player that’s there.”
Barber took over as scouting director in late 2019, and he was promoted to assistant GM in November 2023. He’s led the draft room five times already for Philadelphia, and he’s exclusively taken high schoolers in the first round so far. The Phillies took pitcher Mick Abel with the 15th pick in 2020, pitcher Andrew Painter with the 13th pick in 2021, outfielder Justin Crawford with the 17th pick in 2022, infielder Aidan Miller with the 27th pick in 2023 and outfielder Dante Nori with the 27th pick in 2024.
“In past years, we saw the best players that were on the board happened to be on the high-school side of things,” Barber said. “You have the associated risk that goes with a player that’s further away from the big leagues. But we just saw the upside and potential for impact from those guys, that it was something we weren’t ready to shy away from.”
That doesn’t mean the Phillies will necessarily take another prep player with their first choice this time around. They’re sort of at the mercy of the 25 clubs picking ahead of them.
The strength of this year’s draft class, in Barber’s view, is prep position players, specifically middle infielders. He also noted that the crop of college pitchers appears to be stronger than in the last handful of years. Perhaps those kinds of players will be taken heavily at the top of the draft.
Barber said his staff has scouted around 43 players that the team would consider taking with the No. 26 pick at this point. The Phillies have deemed that 15 or so have just about no chance of actually reaching them at that spot, leaving a list of 28 players that they’ve realistically discussed as possibilities in the first round.
That group will shrink as players come off the board on Sunday, but it’s hard to predict exactly how it will play out. The Phillies will lean on the work of their scouting department to make the 26th selection when it’s their turn to pick.
“You never know when a guy falls that you think might not otherwise,” Barber said, “so you have to be prepared for anybody.”