Earlier this month, Marist baseball embarked on the start of a new season by trekking down to Winston-Salem, NC to play four games at the home of Wake Forest, the team that now boasts the ultra-talented former Marist infielder/outfielder Ethan Conrad who is primed to join the ranks of professional baseball in the coming months.
Conrad, a junior and Hudson Valley native, played two seasons at Marist and consistently flashed the tools that collegiate and professional scouts dream of. In 103 games with the Red Foxes, Conrad batted .359 with 12 home runs and an impressive 1.012 OPS while stealing 36 bases. He also displayed positional versatility, logging innings at first base and across the outfield.
In addition to his great collegiate play at Marist and Wake Forest, Conrad has also been lighting up collegiate summer leagues for the past few seasons. After batting .389 with a 1.171 OPS during the 2024 season at Marist, he played in the Perfect Game Collegiate League in New York for the Saugerties Stallions; he played against a wide-ranging group of collegiate players, including highly regarded SEC stars and lesser-known junior college players. He ripped through the Perfect Game league, hitting .469 with five home runs in just 13 games while getting on base at a .552 clip.
Conrad’s elite 13-game run gave him the opportunity to join the Bourne Braves of the highly touted Cape Cod League later in the summer. ‘The Cape’ is known as the top tier of summer collegiate baseball; one out of every seven MLB players came out of the Cape Cod League, per the league’s FAQ page. The league is filled with talent from mostly power conferences, with some mid-major standouts like Conrad.
In a slightly larger 30-game sample, Conrad was near the top of the league in most major statistical categories. He ranked second in OPS (.920) and batting average (.385) and was third in stolen bases (19).
Currently, the MLB pipeline draft leaderboard has the lefty ranked 23rd overall in the upcoming draft class. On the MLB 20-80 prospect grading scale, Conrad currently has a 55 hit grade, run grade and field grade, which means the scouting world believes those specific skills of his to be above average.
Conrad still has most of a hugely important collegiate season ahead of him, but come July, he is projected to be a first-round pick in the MLB Amateur Draft at the All-Star weekend festivities in Atlanta, GA. While he does boast numerous above-average skills, including what MLB Pipeline’s scouting report says is an ability to make “repeated contact with a simple left-handed swing and gap-to-gap approach,” he also has his weaknesses, as most prospects do. Pipeline references his aggressive tendencies as a hitter who “chases all types of pitches out of the zone” and that “there are some concerns that he doesn’t drive balls in the air to his pull side very often.”
Surface-level numbers suggest that Conrad may be improving his free-swinging approach. In his freshman season at Marist, Conrad struck out 24.5% of the time; he cut that to just 12.4% last season. Conrad’s relative dominance of MAAC competition may mean that his strikeout rate at Marist is not the best measure of his swing decisions, but it is a stark improvement nonetheless. This season at Wake Forest will be a big test for Conrad to continue to develop his skills and improve his weaknesses against difficult competition in order to solidify his spot near the top of the upcoming draft class.
In mid-February, Conrad displayed all of his abilities in an opening weekend that saw the Demon Deacons, Red Foxes and Long Island University Sharks each play four games in three days against each other at Wake Forest’s David F. Couch Ballpark. Conrad collected eight hits in 15 at-bats on the weekend, six of which were extra-base hits. He also drove in 10 runs and hit his first home run as a Demon Deacon against Marist.
Conrad’s booming performance against Marist provided a stark reminder that, for the first time, his abilities were being displayed against the Red Foxes, not for them. After Conrad transferred, Marist Head Coach Lance Ratchford’s staff turned to the transfer portal to try to restore some of Conrad’s impact. Marist brought in a few bats, including redshirt freshman outfielder Chris Diaz from Tulane and junior infielder/outfielder Aydan McNelly from Lackawanna College. In the early going, Diaz has played the outfield while McNelly has played much of the first base for the Red Foxes; both positions formerly occupied by Conrad.
Diaz got on base in all four games in Winston Salem and hit his first collegiate home run against Wake Forest. McNelly also played well to open the season, garnering seven hits on opening weekend. But unless both Diaz and McNelly play at a near other-wordly level, it will be incredibly challenging for them to fill the large shoes left by one of Marist’s best hitters this century.
As for Conrad, he joined a Wake Forest team that began the season as the 16th-ranked team in the AP poll. Despite being a powerhouse for the last couple of years, the Demon Deacons have not made the College World Series final since they last won the tournament in 1955. In what is likely the final act of his collegiate career, he will be relied on in Winston-Salem to add top-end/middle-of-the-order talent to an elite Wake Forest baseball program that looks to do damage in a highly competitive ACC and beyond.
Edited by Max Rosen and Ben Leeds
Graphic by Quinn DiFiore
Photos from Marist Athletics and Wake Forest Athletics
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