Is Major League Baseball Seeing More Early-Season Debuts?
An IBWAA co-director looks at the MLB debuts this season to ponder whether more impact debuts have been this season than previously.
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . With their victory on Saturday, Coastal Carolina University became the first team to clinch their spot in the 8-team College World Series field, kicking off this coming weekend in Omaha, Neb. Coastal’s defeat of Auburn in the Super Regional round along with Arkansas winning over conference foe Tennessee in the Supers meant that of the eight SEC regional top seeds, only two will advance to Omaha.
. . . Coastal’s victory also means that Omaha will have more diversity than last season, when the entire field was comprised of members of the SEC or ACC. With one more spot up for grabs today, there will be no conference with more than two representatives in Omaha, and six conference affiliations will be represented (considering “independent” an affiliation of no affiliation).
Leading Off
Is Major League Baseball Seeing More Impact Debuts?
By Benjamin Chase
While I’m a lifelong Atlanta Braves fan, I’m first and foremost a baseball fan, so as I work at the newspaper, I often utilize my MLB.tv subscription to put a ballgame on in the background - even one this past week between the Rockies and Marlins (I know, I have a sickness).
This past week on three different Major League Baseball broadcasts and even on one minor league game that I tuned into, the question was asked whether there are more impact players making their debut this season than in previous years. I thought I’d take a look.
Are There More Debuts In General?
The first thing to look at is whether or not there are more debuts than typical. I looked at Baseball-Reference’s MLB debut page and went back over the past five years.
The 2025 season has seen 129 debuts through June 8. This is higher than usual, as typically there are roughly between 110-120 debuts, but the 2022 season did have an outlier amount that exceeds this year, with 144 debuts.
Are More Top Prospects Being Promoted?
The current Collective Bargaining Agreement does incentivize teams to promote top prospects earlier for a potential draft pick if the player happens to spend a set amount of time with the team, is ranked as a top-100 prospect among multiple ranking systems, and happens to win the Rookie of the Year award.
The details of this system have had mixed effects, as some teams still are hesitant to promote top prospects, especially if they’re not viable options immediately on Opening Day, simply because of another clause in the Prospect Promotion Initiative, that any player who is short of a full season of service time and wins the Rookie of the Year will receive a full season toward arbitration and eventual free agency. The league has seen the Braves act quickly to sign Michael Harris II to a long-term contract after he won the award in a season too short to earn the club a draft choice. Last year, Paul Skenes did the same thing with the Pirates, so he now has a full season of service time rather than the partial season that he was on the team.
That does raise the question of whether more players on the preseason top 100 list are being promoted. To do that, I reviewed a spreadsheet that I keep of six of the major top-100 prospect lists and examined which players debuted over the past two seasons. In 2025, there have been 22 players who appeared on one of those lists make their MLB debut. Seventeen more appeared on lists but had already debuted, and there are certainly more to come.
I went back just one year to 2024, when there were 112 debuts by June 8. Of those, 16 had debuted by June 8 (Adael Amador and Hurston Waldrep would debut the next day). So, there have been more, but not by any crazy amount.
Are More Impactful Players Debuting?
Of course, the “impact” of a player is subjective, despite all the various metrics that attempt to measure everything going on in the game, it’s hard to measure how a team with an injury-riddled, subpar first base situation would respond to simply a league-average guy who was in the lineup every day. That said, it’s hard to argue that 2024 didn’t have some significant impact guys who debuted by this point - Jackson Chourio, Wyatt Langford, Jackson Merrill, Paul Skenes, Jared Jones, and Colt Keith were major fixtures on their teams.
This season, players with significantly high rankings have been promoted, but not all have made “impacts” for their clubs. Drake Baldwin could be argued as the guy with the biggest impact who has been up all season, but guys like Kristian Campbell, Roki Sasaki, Nick Kurtz, and Cam Smith have been up and filled important roles.
As with all prospecting, the best answer is, “We’ll see!” From here to the end of the season could potentially see someone like Jac Caglianone go on a run like Michael Harris II did to be Rookie of the Year despite being promoted later, or perhaps someone who has been up all season finds another gear. For now, the announcers discussing how this is some sort of historic level of “impact” players debuting in 2025 are doing so with plenty of speculation to the respective futures of these players!
Benjamin Chase is one of the team of co-directors for IBWAA and edits the Monday newsletter. He is the managing editor for one of the remaining local daily newspapers in the country in his day job. In his “free” time, he writes for his Medium site, Chasing Baseball Greatness, and is also part of the Pallazzo Podcast team, focusing on prospects. You can find him on most social media sites under the handle biggentleben.
Extra Innings
One of the privileges of being a member of the IBWAA is the opportunity to vote for various elections, like the Hall of Fame and postseason awards. Right now, the IBWAA has voting for another one of its yearly ballots going on - All-Star balloting. Unlike the MLB All-Star ballot (link to allow you to go vote there as well!), the IBWAA ballot offers the voter an opportunity to include multiple hitters and also to vote for deserving pitchers!
Are there three shortstops who all are having deserving seasons, making it near-impossible to vote for just one? Put one in the shortstop position and the other two into the “at-large position player” portion of your ballot!
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Well done Ben!