MLB Draft Combine 2025: Everything you need to know as workouts begins in Phoenix

How long has this been a thing?

Don’t feel bad if you’re unfamiliar with this event. This is only the fifth year MLB has held a draft combine and only the third time it has taken place at Phoenix’s Chase Field, with the inaugural showcase held in Cary, North Carolina, in 2021, and the second set at San Diego’s Petco Park in 2022.

While the MLB Draft dates to 1965, only recently has the event and the process surrounding it become more accessible to fans and more promoted by the league. Unlike the NFL or NBA drafts, which have been television spectacles for decades, it wasn’t until 2009 that the MLB Draft was televised. From 2009 to 2020, the draft — or, at least, the first couple of rounds — took place in early June at the MLB Network studios in Secaucus, New Jersey. In 2021, MLB pushed the draft back a month and made it part of All-Star weekend, creating the opportunity for fans to attend the draft that Sunday evening. This has helped make the scene on television (and in person) more like that of the other major sports leagues’ drafts, albeit on a smaller scale.

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Solidifying the combine as a crucial week on the baseball calendar represents the latest effort from MLB to grow awareness and hype for its draft among fans, and it’s an obvious opportunity to highlight the amateur players who hope to become stars at the big-league level.

What happens at the combine?

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Chase Field will be packed with players cycling through batting practice and bullpen sessions, all of which will be monitored by the same motion-tracking technology used during big-league games. Players who choose to participate in the on-field workouts will produce data such as exit velocities, launch angles and projected distances for batted balls for hitters and velocity, movement and spin for pitchers. For some high school players, this will be their first time performing in a setting that allows for these measured evaluations, affording them the chance to separate themselves from their peers by hitting certain benchmarks.

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On Tuesday evening, a selection of high school players will compete in a game, affording scouts the opportunity to see prospects perform in a live setting beyond batting practice and bullpen sessions. This is a particularly valuable opportunity for prep players who hail from areas where the competition is lesser than it is in, say, Florida or California, as they can showcase their skills in a game setting against a higher caliber of peers.

Because collegiate prospects have significantly more chances to prove themselves against higher levels of competition over the course of an NCAA season, there is less incentive to organize an official game for those players at the combine. To that end, even beyond the game, the high school players in attendance are more likely to participate in on-field workouts because they have more to gain by demonstrating their pure physical abilities than college players, who have a much larger sample of statistics on which their evaluations are already based.

On Thursday and Friday, players will undergo a series of strength and conditioning assessments that track a vast array of physical traits, from foot speed and grip strength to agility, vision and much, much more.

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Beyond the workouts on the field, arguably the most important element of the event is the chance for teams to meet players individually and get to know them, a vital process for both sides to feel comfortable before offering or agreeing to a multi-million-dollar bonus in the first few rounds of the draft. The statistics and physical attributes sometimes only go so far for a prospect; it’s absolutely imperative that a team feels confident in a player’s potential to get the most out of his natural ability as he enters the grind of professional baseball.

While area scouts meet with players throughout the year, no other event affords the opportunity for this many front office personnel to sit down in person with this many draft-eligible prospects over a short period of time. Each MLB club has its own suite at Chase Field that players will cycle through for interviews over the course of the week. Each team handles this process differently, with some sending 10-plus members of the front office to participate in interviews and others sending just a handful of representatives from the amateur scouting department.

In addition, some teams narrow their list of interviews to a few dozen players of interest, while others try to squeeze as many intel-gathering conversations into the week as possible. While these discussions take place behind closed doors, they can impact a team’s draft board just as much as what takes place on the field.

Which players will be in Phoenix?

More than 300 draft-eligible players accepted invitations to attend the combine, including 174 of MLB Pipeline’s Top 200 prospects for this year’s class. A little more than half of the players in attendance will be from the collegiate ranks, with 90 schools sending players to the combine, ranging from Division I powerhouses to ascendant mid-majors to some junior colleges and even a Division III program in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The rest will be prep players hailing from high schools in 31 different states, plus a right-handed pitcher from Washington D.C., four players from Puerto Rico and two from Canada.

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Tennessee (eight combine invitees) and Florida State (seven) will be the programs most represented at Chase Field, with each school’s headliner an elite southpaw: Volunteers ace Liam Doyle and Seminoles star Jamie Arnold. Neither is slated to throw on-field this week, but their presence will highlight one of the biggest storylines of next month’s draft: A trio of top-tier college left-handers — Doyle, Arnold and LSU lefty Kade Anderson — are expected to be selected in the first few picks, in some yet-to-be-determined order. Anderson, who pitched brilliantly for the Tigers on Saturday in their opening game in the Men’s College World Series, is still in Omaha as the Tigers push for a national championship and thus won’t be in attendance at the combine. Arnold entered the spring as the clear-cut favorite to be drafted first among this group, while Doyle and Anderson soared up boards this spring.

Beyond the premier lefties, another feature of the top of this year’s draft is a notably stronger crop of high school talent than in last year’s class, which produced just two prep picks among the first 15 selections: SS/CF Konnor Griffin at No. 9 and SS Bryce Rainer at No. 11 (both of whom were at last year’s combine). This year could see five prep players taken within the first 10 picks, including a pair of high school teammates in right-hander Seth Hernandez and shortstop Billy Carlson. Co-stars at Corona High School in Southern California, Hernandez and Carlson delivered on massive hype for a powerhouse Panthers team that went 28-3, and they’ve positioned themselves to hear their names called extremely early in the first round. Those two will be at the combine, as well as another candidate from the prep ranks who could go in the top 10, shortstop JoJo Parker from Purvis High School in Mississippi.

Unfortunately, the two best high school players in the class — Ethan Holliday and Eli Willits, infielders from Oklahoma with fathers who played in the big leagues — will not be at the combine. Still, this group of prep stars promises to give the teams picking at the top a lot to think about.

How can I follow along?

MLB Network is broadcasting the combine starting Tuesday, with coverage of the workouts taking place on the field as well as interviews with some of the top players in attendance.

I will also be there Tuesday and Wednesday, so stay tuned for more Yahoo Sports coverage from Phoenix.