Tough call. I've talked to a couple coaches that won't take a freshman position player from any school, believing that there's just too much risk: facing a higher level of pitching nightly, having played perhaps 50 games already, in the longest season of their young life, and then coming for 2 months of pretty much nightly baseball.
Everybody has good high school stats so they don't help much. If a freshman excelled on a high level travel team, that is helpful but there is a general "uneasiness" as it's hard to project. The biggest thing that can help a freshman is the coach's recommendation-we've signed a number of freshmen, but in every case but one, their college coach has had a detailed discussion with our Director of Player Personnel before we offered. So far, we've found the coaches to shoot very straight with us. (We've had coaches actually tell us they have nobody ready for our league.) Placing a freshman without a coach's recommendation can be tough.
Even pitchers, and everybody is always looking for pitching, aren't easy to project. Most likely every summer team has had the experience of being told a freshman pitcher "will be a weekday starter for us", and by late spring, the kid has thrown 6 innings total, so he comes to summer ball, facing an ACC #3 hitter, having thrown less than 10 college innings. Years ago, my older son was a freshman redshirt, signed to play in the Valley League, so he had no innings in the spring, and 3-4 days into summer ball he's facing Jon Jay. Yes, that Jon Jay. (And by the way, his claim to fame, he K'ed him on a changeup that almost got a delay of game penalty.)
One summer's experience can help the next: we've routinely looked at past summer wooden bat stats, no matter what league, and a good performance is surely helpful. The problem we encounter is that while many leagues, like the Valley League, Coastal Plains, NECBL, Northwoods, etc. keep very accurate and up to date stats, easily accessible, way too many leagues apparently rely on coaches to input the data...and it often is sporadic at best. I looked for a guy last week that I know played in at least 40 games and reportedly hit very well, but the on line stats showed his team only played 10 games and he hit .250...obviously, nobody put a premium on keeping stats up to date, which is unfortunate.
The best advice I can give is to be proactive, and sell whatever a player has to sell. We get an amazing number of inquiries-my DPP told me this morning that a day hasn't gone by recently when he hasn't heard from a coach or player looking for spot, although our roster is now 95% completed.
More and more leagues are charging fees, and an internet search will pop up a lot of summer leagues, so if you don't mind paying, I'm sure there are spots, but googling or posting questions on sites like this one would be a good idea to see how well things are run.