The two of us were part of the FanGraphs contingent in Phoenix for the 2024 MLB Draft Combine last week. The first half of the week consisted of showcase events like batting practice, infield and outfield drills, and a game featuring many of the high schoolers in attendance. The back half of the week consisted of athletic and biometric testing, including the 30-yard dash.

Below are scouting notes for some of our favorite hitters from the event. Major League Baseball distributes a list of the top performers in several of the athletic tests to the media, but doesn’t share complete data. Eric recorded the electronic 30-yard times by hand as they unfolded; at the very bottom of the post is a complete list of those times, save for the couple he missed while he was schmoozing, eating, etc. (Update: Arnold Abernathy’s time has been added) We’ll have a post highlighting Combine pitchers, as well as a draft ranking update, to follow. The players aren’t listed in any particular order; our initials appear at the end of the blurbs we wrote. Read the rest of this entry »

JJ Wetherholt is in an unusual position. A third-year finance student at West Virginia University with an interest in math who once considered going to law school, Wetherholt is leaving college early, and says his parents couldn’t be more proud.

As prestigious and lucrative as a career in law or finance can be, neither holds a candle to professional baseball, and Wetherholt is one of the leading candidates for the top pick in this year’s draft.

In addition to academic All-Big 12 and All-American honors, Wetherholt hit .373/.471/.632 with 29 homers, 56 stolen bases, and more walks than strikeouts in 143 career college games. A compact, sinewy 5-foot-10, 190-pound second baseman with great bat speed from an open, left-handed stance, he’s a lock to become WVU’s highest draft pick ever. (The record is currently 11th overall, shared by Alek Manoah in 2019 and right-hander Chris Enochs in 1997.) Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday afternoon, I sat down to watch the most important baseball game of the weekend: The Greenville Regional elimination game between East Carolina and Wake Forest. This game not only had NCAA Tournament survival on the line, it featured two of the top three college pitching prospects in this draft class: Wake’s Chase Burns and ECU’s Trey Yesavage.

In many respects, it mirrored last year’s College World Series semifinal between Wake and LSU, in which the two starting pitchers — Paul Skenes and Rhett Lowder — were the first two arms off the board in the draft. That was, for my money, the best baseball game played anywhere in 2023 and one of the best College World Series games of all time. Skenes and Lowder combined to allow five hits over 15 scoreless innings, and the only runs of the game were scored on the final play, a walk-off home run in the bottom of the 11th.

That was Mad Max: Fury Road, a bombastic, thrilling, and yet obviously virtuosic thriller that could not have been improved. ECU-Wake was more like Licorice Pizza: Clearly everyone involved was good at their craft, but the end result was weird and meandering and frustrating. Burns was a little disappointing; Yesavage was great, but after he was lifted in the eighth inning, ECU coach Cliff Godwin used seven pitchers to get the last five outs. In the meantime, Wake scored five runs in the top of the ninth to take a 6-4 lead, after which ECU struck back with five singles in the bottom of the ninth to walk it off. Read the rest of this entry »

If you read the 2,300-word NCAA Tournament preview from yesterday, you probably noticed that it only included eight regionals and 32 teams, which is only half the field. That’d leave newcomers woefully unprepared for the bacchanal of college baseball that is to come. So join me for a quick look at the other 32 teams that will set out to claim a spot in the Men’s College World Series. Remember: The goal is 150 words per region. Let’s see if I can do it this time. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll start by conceding that one of the greatest strengths of college baseball, as an entertainment product, can sometimes be a weakness: There’s just so much of it. On the one hand, the first week of the NCAA Tournament is a baseball sicko’s paradise, with uninterrupted wall-to-wall action from noon to midnight all weekend, and stretching into Monday.

If one game is out of hand early, fear not — you can switch to any one of about six different streams on ESPN+, or you can camp out watching Squeeze Play and chant “Quad Box! Quad Box!” at your TV until Mike Rooney morphs into a kaiju and lays waste to downtown Omaha. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday afternoon, Charlie Condon hit a home run off Texas A&M starter Tanner Jones. Condon, who’d already reached on a fielder’s choice and scored earlier in the inning, put Georgia up 9-0 on the Aggies in the top of the first inning. Even on the road against the no. 1 team in the country, a nine-run first-inning lead seems like a good omen.

Unfortunately for Condon, Jace LaViolette homered in the bottom of the first, and Braden Montgomery added a dinger in the bottom of the third. After one inning, the Aggies had cut the lead to 9-8; by the seventh, they’d scored 19 unanswered runs, enough to invoke the SEC’s mercy rule and end the game. (This was the first game of a doubleheader, by the way, and there were 17 runs in the first inning.)

Condon, LaViolette, and Montgomery are engaged in a historic five-player home run chase. As recently as 2015, Andrew Benintendi of Arkansas wowed the country by leading Division I with 20 home runs. In 2024, 13 players ended April with at least 20 home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

Travis Bazzana, the no. 2 draft prospect on The Board at the moment, had a big day Sunday against Oklahoma State. In four at-bats, the Oregon State second baseman hit four balls 108 mph or harder, coming away with a double and two home runs for his trouble. The first of those home runs was crushed so hard that the outfielders didn’t bother chasing it — one of baseball’s great subtle aesthetic signifiers. More than that, the DJ at Globe Life Field was able to spin up the theme from The Natural before the ball even landed:

And now Travis Bazzana gets in on the action!https://t.co/a1pkN1nG65#GoBeavs pic.twitter.com/SOlYsavVyZ

— Oregon State Baseball (@BeaverBaseball) February 25, 2024

That’s how you know it’s gone. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re cursing the obstinance of winter, wishing for baseball to return in earnest, you’re in luck. The Division I college baseball season starts today. The real sickos among you already knew this, and have no doubt been studying Jac Caglianone’s Trackman data exhaustively since Thanksgiving. But if you’re new to the college game, you might not know where to start.

A proper exhaustive college baseball preview takes half a dozen writers weeks to compile. As one guy with less than 4,000 words to work with, I’ve chosen to highlight seven teams I believe will be interesting and/or important to the coming season. I expect all seven to make the NCAA tournament, and my national championship pick is among them, but this is not a College World Series preview or an ordered ranking.

Instead, I tried to add in a little variety, in terms of quality, region, and conference. Most of these teams are interesting because I don’t know exactly how good they’ll be. But I’ll be going out of my way to track them throughout the spring, because I believe they’ll each have an outsize impact on the college baseball landscape. Here they are, in no particular order. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to college baseball conference realignment. For those of you who missed the first class, here’s a quick summary: The people who run college football are drunk with power, and are tearing up decades of geographical and cultural alignment in order to chase the biggest TV deals they can get. Good for them. Unfortunately the rest of college sports — perhaps the whole of American higher education, less those Ivy League dorks whose personal grievances become national news — is merely a vestigial appendage of the Football Bowl Subdivision.

The realignment of 2023-24 leaves two important questions to be answered, one urgent, the other existentially important. The urgent question: What happens to Oregon State and Washington State, the two schools left without a chair by Pac-12 collapse? This question is arguably more important for baseball than it is any other sport, as Oregon State is a national powerhouse. The important question: Can the ACC hold it together, or is it too bound for a Pac-12-type implosion?

We got some clarity on both of those questions this week, as Oregon State and Washington State found a new partnership with the WCC (though not for baseball), while Florida State is taking its first step toward leaving the ACC. Read the rest of this entry »

This World Series has something for everyone: Up-and-coming stars, clutch heroics, veterans hanging around in search of that long-elusive ring. And if you’re like me, you know the most important question of this series is: How can I make it all about a South Carolina Gamecocks team from more than a decade ago?

This is pretty freaking cool!#Gamecocks | #WorldSeries pic.twitter.com/qIozcOe4el

— Gamecock Baseball (@GamecockBasebll) October 29, 2023

On Saturday night, Jordan Montgomery and Christian Walker took the field for a World Series game together. For a second time. Read the rest of this entry »