The most talked about player in the Arizona Fall League might be Seaver King. After a mixed bag of results during his High-A Wilmington and Double-A Harrisburg stints in 2025, King was chosen among the eight Washington Nationals’ minor leaguers with an opportunity to play in the prestigious AFL. And so far, King has stepped up to shine in the Arizona sunshine.
Few players had as much to prove as King who was the No. 10 overall draft pick in the deep 2024 class. There was a time when King was a Top-3 projected pick, and he slid due to some inconsistencies in his final season in college that he played with Wake Forest.
“King’s 2025 regular season was derailed in spring training by a specific Nationals coach encouraging him to change his swing to pull the ball in the air more. The results speak for themselves: he started in a huge funk, with a .222/.283/.333 line and 27.6 percent strikeout rate on May 15, then hit well for two weeks before a promotion to Double-A.”
— Keith Law wrote in an article in The Athletic
Yes, what Law wrote is alarming. Who is that coach? I DM’d Law who told me that coach is still employed by the Nationals. Hopefully PoBO Paul Toboni contacts Law to get a name, and sends that person to some other organization.
In Double-A, King hit .233 with a .600 OPS. The good news was that King moved up a level and actually lowered his K-rate to 20.7 percent. That might say that his BABIP was a bit unlucky. Also, both Wilmington and Harrisburg tend to be pitcher-friendly parks.
Two things coaches told me was King is a good baserunner (30-for-34 in stolen bases), and he also learned to bunt. He had four sacrifice bunts in the minors this year. His defense needs work. Way too many errors at shortstop with a .953 fielding percentage in the minors in 2025, and I saw him make an error on Tuesday. But his range is good and he gets up on his toes at the pitch is on its way.
If it matters, King looks like a ballplayer and a student of the game. He is just locked-in and up on the rail with his teammates — and not because he has to. While King was at Wingate University, he set a Division II record with a 47-game hitting streak during his 2022 and 2023 seasons. The streak was the third-longest in Division II history, only seven games short of tying the all-time record of 54.
Going into the draft, King was ranked No. 17 according to Baseball America and MLBPipeline.com. King was a Dick Howser Trophy (top collegiate player) semifinalist and garnered Third-Team All-Atlantic Coast Conference honors after his junior season. Prior to the start of his junior campaign, he was named Preseason Third-Team All-America by D1Baseball.com. In high school, King was a two-sport athlete between baseball and track & field. He placed fifth in the State of Georgia in the high jump.
Between his sophomore and junior seasons, King played for Harwich in the Cape Cod Baseball League, where he slashed .424/.479/.542 with four doubles, one homer, nine RBI, five stolen bases, seven walks and 15 runs scored in 16 games. That is what put King into the evaluator’s Top-3 at one point — but again, he had some struggles at Wake Forest where he only hit .308, and in college, that didn’t even rank him in the Top-100 in batting average.
Again, King didn’t slide far in draft prospect rankings — but it was a surprise to many that King was drafted at No. 10. Yes, clearly per my pre-draft writings, had Nick Kurtz (King’s college teammate) if available — and he wasn’t available as he was taken earlier. My backup pick was Trey Yesavage — and yes, he was available. Some said King was taken to go underslot with the pick which seems ridiculous when you always go best-player-available with a high pick like that.
Yes, King was paid underslot and that money was used for Luke Dickerson in the second round. And Caleb Lomavita was picked as a supplemental pick by the Nats between King and Dickerson.
But maybe just maybe the Nats were still high on King because they saw something in him to get him back to where he was at Wingate and in the Cape Cod League. We will see as they say, and overall, King is having a good AFL so far batting .351 with a 1.091 OPS. Unfortunately, I saw his worst two games between Tuesday and Wednesday where he had a combined 0-fer and a bunch of Ks. Chalk that up to small sample size issues. No reason to magnify two games while King is having a good AFL so far.
Some good news, Sao Magnifico calculated that from Sept 2. in Double-A through yesterday in the AFL, King is slashing .346/.409/.538 with a .947 OPS. Again, the sample sizes are getting larger, and we will see how everything comes together for King in the rest of the AFL and into his 2026 season.
