Misc Baseball News

10 Players Trending Up & Wake Forest First-Rounders

How To Stream Top 25 College Baseball Games, What To Watch For And More (3/4/22)

Welcome to the week four stock watch!

Last week I took a look at how the top 100-ranked college pitchers were performing. This week is a bit of a mixed bag, with 10 prospects who are trending up draft boards as well as a few in-person notes from a Wake Forest-Duke matchup I laid eyes on this past weekend in Durham, which featured first-round talents RHP Rhett Lowder and 3B Brock Wilken.

I know you aren’t here for the intro, so let’s dive straight into the players:

10 Players Trending Up

Chase Davis, OF, Arizona (No. 43)

Davis has looked great early this season, and through his first 14 games has slashed .328/.427/.690 with six home runs, three doubles and nearly as many walks (9) as strikeouts (10). He leads Arizona in homers and is second on the team with a 1.116 OPS.

While Arizona is just one week into conference play, it did play a challenging schedule to start the year, and Davis has so far improved on the 68% contact rate he had entering the 2023 season—bumping that number up to 77% through his first 13 games.

If he can maintain that sort of contact throughout the year, it will certainly move him up draft boards, as Davis has a solid foundation of athleticism with a pair of plus tools in his power and arm strength. He’d look right at home on a big league field and is playing like it so far this season.

Nolan Schanuel, 1B, Florida Atlantic (No. 44)

With Louisiana State’s Tre’ Morgan splitting his time between left field and first base so far this season, it feels like Schanuel has solidly taken hold as the top college first baseman in the class at this point. He entered the year with one of the better contact and exit velocity combinations in the class and through his first 17 games is raking, to the tune of a .464/.630/1.036 slash line with eight home runs and a 20-to-8 walk-to-strikeout ratio.

Schanuel had a bit of a platform game last Tuesday in a midweek matchup against Florida, in which he went 3-for-4 with three home runs. First he turned around a 95 mph fastball from Yoel Tejeda Jr. to the pull side, then he muscled out an 82 mph slider that hung over the middle of the plate to straight center field and finally he got inside an up-and-in 82 mph slider from Ryan Slater and hit a no-doubt moonshot to right-center.

There’s plenty of buzz on Schanuel in Florida thanks to his raw power and the fact that he seems to be getting to every bit of it that he has—in addition to some sneaky athleticism and an advanced hitting approach. His profile…

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