Stanford Loses Top MLB Draft Prospect to Transfer Portal

Stanford baseball may be in trouble. Having already lost Friday starter Matt Scott to Georgia in the transfer portal earlier this month, the program will likely soon be without Joey Volchko. On3 is reporting that the right-hander has entered his name into the portal, along with a "do not contact" tag, which signifies he has a good idea of where he'd like to end up.

Scott entered his junior campaign as one of the top draft options available according to a number of outlets, but another down year where he posted a 6.02 ERA with a 1.701 WHIP saw him fall into more of a fourth or fifth rounder when the season was over.

While Scott still has one more year of eligibility, the MLB Draft typically consists of high school seniors and college juniors as the top players. If a college player is entering the draft as a senior, that limits their negotiating power as a draftee, since they basically have to take whatever is offered to them, while also making them an older player entering the lower minor leagues.

That also makes it harder for some players to climb up the organizational ladder in a timely fashion, and could mess up a player's promotion schedule.

Volchko likely saw this happen to his fellow righty at Stanford and wanted to seek out another option that could help avoid similar obstacles in his own journey. It would also appear as though he didn't feel as though Stanford was the best fit for making that happen.

Like Scott, Volchko ended the 2025 campaign with a 6.01 ERA across 15 starts spanning 70 1/3 innings of work. He struck out 56 and walked 34 in that span, while also tossing 16 wild pitches. Despite the numbers, Baseball America has him as their No. 15 prospect on their 2026 Draft Board. Stanford teammate Rintaro Sasaki is also ranked on this board, sitting at No. 36 overall.

It's hard to fault a guy like Volchko, or Scott for that matter, for wanting to seek out a program that may fit their needs a bit better. Both right-handers have tremendous stuff, and they have been rated very well on their offerings by outlets like Baseball America in recent years. The results just haven't been there for them.

What could be a little worrisome here is that Scott and Volchko are far from the only players that Stanford has lost to the portal this summer. They've just been part of a much larger list that also includes Temo Becerra, Charlie Saum, and Ty Uber.

Part of the problem here, as On3 points out, is that there are fewer baseball scholarships to go around, typically between 11 and 12, and those have to be balanced between incoming players as well as those that are sticking around. It's a lot more complicated than in football.

This is purely speculation, but that could be part of the reason that Scott, Uber and Saum decided to enter the portal in the first place, given that they're all upperclassmen. If that's the case, then Stanford baseball may not be in as much trouble as we initially thought, but there is still work to do to make sure that those juniors turn into draft prospects opposed to transfer portal candidates.