Lookout Landing’s 2025 Prospect Rankings: #1 Colt Emerson

He checks a whole lot of boxes, and his best comparable might just already have been a Mariner.

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Here, however, is Colt Emerson. Nationally, he’s the highest-ranked Mariners prospect since the graduations of Julio Rodríguez and George Kirby, running essentially parallel to the progression of Noelvi Marte to this point. It is perhaps Marte, an infielder who was similarly a precocious teenager to appear on the scene with projectable tools whose lens is useful in viewing Emerson ahead of 2025.

What makes Emerson our top prospect, the current unanimous top prospect in the system nationally, and a top 20-30 prospect nationally? Not to be difficult, but it’s a little bit of everything. Watching the teenager in the field, it’s not difficult to see how he’ll be able to stick on the infield dirt. He moves well, the ball zips out of his hand, and is accurate on release with consistency.

Because his foot speed isn’t extraordinary, it’s easy enough to envision Emerson at third base if needed in the long term future, however I do not worry about him struggling to hold his own at short. Essentially, he’s solid there in a way that’s just a bit ahead of Cole Young, largely due to the arm. At this stage, Marte was still inconsistent with his arm, racking up errors but flashing the arm strength to handle the same left side of the infield range as Emerson.

More pertinent is what Emerson can bring to the dish, and as frequent viewers of spring training games, Modesto Nuts baseball, or the Arizona Fall League got to witness, there’s quite a bit.

The load flows into the swing smoothly and without excess movement. You don’t run a walk rate nearly even with your strikeout rate by moving your head around or misreading pitches consistently, after all. Emerson’s taste at the dish is excellent, as is his ability to whip his hands into position for contact, avoiding the trap of taking too many pitches and stumbling into strikeouts too frequently. As such he’s able to explode towards the ball and lash hard line drives across the whole park. Separating him from Young once again, is that he just hits the ball harder, at least at his peak, than his predecessor at each level. With lightning-quick bat speed, Emerson generates the type of exit velocities on his best contact that you’d be pleased seeing from a middle of the order big league slugger. If we’re looking at Marte for comparison, once again, the powerful righty was damage threat, walking frequently enough while striking out at a reasonable rate as well. However, his ability to loft was more fully formed at age 19 already, and therefore generating greater in-game power than Emerson has thus far.

What’s keeping Emerson from the consideration of a top prospect in all of baseball is that question of whether he can loft the ball consistently. The swing looks sensational when he barrels it up, and the M’s don’t seem adamant about changing it up significantly as he enters just his age 19 season, likely to either start where he finished in High-A Everett or perhaps even go right up to Double-A Arkansas. When Colt connects on a pitch perfectly, only a few players in the system at any level can rival him, but those 400+ foot bombs are ambushes that he’s not consistently managed to string together, essentially outliers amid a sea of still-good line drives into the grass and gaps. A 10-15 home run hitting shortstop with massive BP and ambush power that plays down in games, who walks a ton and strikes out sporadically, with better baserunning speed than base stealing speed might sound familiar. That’s J.P. Crawford, and that’d be a sensational outcome for Seattle of course to see Emerson develop into. If a bit more of that power trickles into the teenager’s numbers across the course of a season, well, all of these comparables will take a back seat.