Gavin Kilen Tops Giants' 2025 Draft Class

Giants make a play for contact with top two picks

For all the talk of what might change in the Giants’ draft strategy under a new head of baseball operations, the team spent their first day showing that their values haven’t changed very much. With the #13 pick in the 2025 draft, the Giants went with Tennessee infielder, Gavin Kilen, who brings one of the best contact tools in the draft from the left-side. And, with their second pick, they went after Rutgers outfielder, Trevor Cohen, who could pick a pretty good argument with Kilen that he didn’t even have the best contact tool in the Giants’ draft class.

Scouting Director Michael Holmes noted that his scouting crew graded both players as having “elite bat to ball skills,” and that is a skill that Holmes has prioritized for a long time. For years, the Giants have talked about “dominating the strike zone,” and the ability to make contact against quality stuff was clearly uppermost in the organizational mind as they went into their first day of this year’s draft — and after watching the weekend’s display of hitting, who could blame them?