Who Goes First Overall to Nationals in Latest 2025 Mock Draft?
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The Washington Nationals have a golden opportunity to add a cornerstone player on Sunday.
After winning the draft lottery and the first overall pick in the 2025 MLB draft, the Nationals are just days away from adding a blue-chip prospect to their pipeline.
For a franchise that has been blessed with first overall picks in prior drafts with clear-cut, generational talents available like Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper, there's a bit more drama surrounding this situation.
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Beyond the fact that there are multiple candidates for Washington to pick, the team fired general manager Mike Rizzo this past Sunday, removing the top decision maker from a front office that almost certainly had conflicting thoughts on what the right move would be.
Whether or not Rizzo's dismissal changes the internal logic on who to take with the pick is unclear, but it does add some intrigue to the mix.
In MLB.com's penultimate mock draft, Jonathan Mayo ventures a guess that the team will take the more pro-ready of their options in Louisiana State pitcher Kade Anderson at No. 1 overall.
"The Nats are still looking at a larger group of candidates, but as Jim and I said on our most recent MLB Pipeline Podcast, we think it’s largely down to Anderson and Ethan Holliday here," Mayo wrote. "We both put the odds for Anderson to be taken at 50 percent, Holliday at 40. I might amend that slightly now and up Anderson to 60 percent, but that’s more gut feel than anything. We don’t know how, if at all, the dismissal of GM Mike Rizzo will impact what the organization does here."
If Anderson is the pick, he would join Pittsburgh Pirates phenom Paul Skenes as the second LSU pitcher in the past three drafts to go first overall.
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He'd be a worthy choice, having just completed a phenomenal campaign with the Tigers in which he held opponents to a 3.18 ERA while posting a 12-1 record and striking out 180 opposing hitters in 119 innings of work.
The lefty authored his signature moment in Game 1 of the College World Series against Coastal Carolina, as he blanked the Chanticleers in a complete-game, 10-strikeout effort. LSU went on to take the best-of-three series in the second contest.
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Anderson would be an obvious fit for a Nationals team that has a good young core of hitters now but needs high-upside pitching, preferably quickly, to support ace MacKenzie Gore.
Washington is not too far off from competing, and if Anderson could arrive as an above-average starter by the start of 2027, it would be a huge boon to the club's rebuild.
For more Nationals news, head over to Nationals On SI.
Kyle Morton has covered various sports from amateur to professional level athletics. A graduate of Fordham University, Kyle specializes in MLB and NHL coverage while having previous bylines with SB Nation, The Hockey Writers, HighSchoolOT, and Sports World News. He spent time working the beat for the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes and is an avid fan of the NHL, MLB, NFL and college basketball. Enjoys the outdoors and hiking in his free time away from sports.