The 2024 NCAA Baseball Tournament is set to get underway Friday with the regional round in which the 64-team field is broken up into 16 groups of four to compete for a spot in the Super Regional round, which directly precedes the College World Series, where the top eight teams compete for a national title.
The NCAA on Monday named Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas A&M, North Carolina, Arkansas, Clemson, Georgia, Florida State, Oklahoma, North Carolina State, Oklahoma State, Virginia, Arizona, Santa Barbara, Oregon State and East Carolina its top-16 national seeds with each squad hosting a regional.
This year’s tournament field features a host of 2024 MLB Draft prospects from potential first overall picks such as Georgia’s Charlie Condon and Florida’s Jac Caglianone to under-the-radar prospects from the mid-major level, who could make a splash at the draft in July.
247Sports takes an in-depth look at the top hitting and pitching draft prospects in each regional:
KNOXVILLE REGIONAL
Teams: No. 1 Tennessee, Southern Mississippi, Indiana, Northern Kentucky
Top hitting prospect
Tennessee second baseman Christian Moore was lights out at the plate in the lead up to the NCAA Tournament, positioning himself to be a significant stock riser come MLB Draft time. The 6-foot-1 infielder from Brooklyn, New York, started in all but one of the Volunteers games as a junior in 2024 and paced his team’s qualified hitters in batting average (.382), runs scored (67), hits (94), home runs (28), RBI (63), slugging (.789) and OPS (1.236).
Moore demonstrated a markedly improved approach throughout his third season at the college level, cutting his strikeout rate by roughly 10 percent and decreasing his ground ball percentage from 39.7 to 37.6 and increasing his fly ball rate by roughly the same margin. A significant drop in walk percentage could be something to keep an eye on but the power-hitting middle infielder’s big-time results are hard to ignore.
Tennessee second baseman Billy Amick is an equally strong pick for the Knoxville Regional’s top hitting prospect as the Clemson transfer batted .317 with 19 home runs in 2024 and proved to be one of the SEC’s tougher outs.
Amick was unstoppable as a sophomore at Clemson in 2023 when he slashed .413/.464/.772.
Top pitching prospect
Though he didn’t quite produce the statistical outputs he likely envisioned for himself in his final season at the college level, Tennessee right-hander Drew Beam is widely viewed as one of the most polished arms in this year’s MLB Draft class and is a fringe first-round pick for teams looking for a low-risk selection.
Beam enters the NCAA Tournament with a 3.92 ERA in a career-high 85 innings and holds a career-best 5.8 walk rate thanks to a mid-90s fastball and sharp sinking changeup. Beams’s stuff did produce a 20.8 strikeout rate this season, which is roughly four percent lower than 2023 but a .310 batting average on balls in play is an improvement from his sophomore season.
