2024 1st Round Pick (#22): Vance Honeycutt - OF - (Jr) North Carolina (NC)

[Warehouse]

Some interesting perspectives from Kiley McDaniel on Honeycutt:

https://espnpressroom.com/us/press-releases/2024/07/transcript-espn-mlb-draft-media-conference-call-with-kiley-mcdaniel/amp/
 

Q. You mentioned that Vance Honeycutt is kind of polarizing, and I believe a year ago he was projected top five and has fallen. Is there anything at play other than the strikeout rate? Which specific organizations do you think are interested in him?

KILEY MCDANIEL: I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily the strikeout rate. That’s been the sort of evidence of what the concern is. 

If I could like visually give it to you, the idea with the swing is to sort of always be at a slight angle. You can kind of start here, you go here, and then your hands move here. 

What he does is he gets his hands very vertical, like almost to 90 degrees, which then means to get them into the hitting zone, you have to flip them around which creates length, and that’s what he does and kind of has always done.

The belief earlier — this is something that is very consistent in baseball — is if somebody performs well and has big tools, scouts don’t dive deeper when they’re a freshman in college because they aren’t eligible for two years.

So he was young, wasn’t really scouted in high school because he was a football guy, whatever, then he has a huge freshman year, and everyone sees the tools and the performance, and everybody is like, oh, yeah, maybe he’s like, 45 at-bats and can hit .250, no problem.

Then as they spend more time paying more attention to him, the swing doesn’t necessarily improve, he tweaks with the setup but doesn’t get to this actual issue here. The pitch selection is good, then it turns bad, and then it turns good again.

These sort of conversations, he might be like an 80 grade, like one of the best in baseball defender. He’s a plus runner with plus arm and plus power. That’s why I’m saying all the eyeball scouting teams like him and all the teams that are into the defensive metrics love him.

Then the question is is he just like Kevin Pillar or Jose Siri or Drew Stubbs, or pick your example of a right-handed hitting center fielder that doesn’t really hit for average but is good at everything else and is a physical marvel that plays defense. Cristian Pache, there’s like a bunch of these guys. They all make the Big Leagues and they’re all useful. Some of them like Kevin Pillar play into their mid-30s. Some of them figure out a way to be pretty good, like Kevin Kiermaier is like this, Harrison Bader is kind of like this, Louis Robert is a really good version of it. Like there’s a ton of guys.

You don’t know what flavor of that guy he’ll be. Is he going to be the guy that’s stuck in Triple-A that hits .210 in Triple-A that never gets there, or is a defensive replacement like Terrance Gore in the playoffs that runs the bases, or is he Louis Robert or like Carlos Gomez or something. It’s really wide range.

I’ve talked to teams that are very good at this, and they’re like, we think he’s a 30 hitter, and we might still take him in the first round. So 30 hitter means we think he will hit .220. He might hit .200, but he’s such a good defender and has such an upside and is so good at all these other things, we think that’s a pretty good player that’s probably an everyday guy because he might be, like, classic Andrelton Simmons, where it’s like, he put up a 2.3 war, and 2.0 of it was all on defense and positioning and base running and stuff.

So that’s the fascinating discussion is if you can look up his in-zone miss rate, it’s really bad, especially in college. That’s only going to get worse as everybody is throwing harder, and his swing is not going to change anytime soon because that’s not an easy thing to fix. He’s been doing it his whole life.

So that’s why he went from, oh, this guy could go one, one, because amongst all the freshmen, he looked wildly ahead of all of them, and then slowly as he didn’t make the adjustment, everybody else got better and scouts looked a little bit closer, and they saw stuff that you would think is fixable, and they’re like, maybe it’s not fixable, maybe it is. The opinion now is maybe it’s not as fixable as we think and it’s going to limit his upside, but it’s still pretty high for a guy that maybe isn’t that good of a hitter.

[baltfan]

Longenhagen on Effectively Wild today said that he doesn’t like his swing and miss as well as he hands.  Said Fabian is a perfect comp.  Said the defense though is good enough so that it could support a poor hit tool. 

[Jim'sKid26]

If he's on the Luis Robert/Kevin Kiermayer side of this scale, he's a fantastic pick. If he's Kevin Pillar/Harrison Bader he's still a good pick. The O's think that can fix him and they are really in no hurry to do so. They have a ton of these guys in the system with Honeycutt having one of the best ceilings. When you take a ton of college bats who are excellent athletes, a pick like this is easier to make. 

[bpilktree67]

22 hours ago, baltfan said:

Longenhagen on Effectively Wild today said that he doesn’t like his swing and miss as well as he hands.  Said Fabian is a perfect comp.  Said the defense though is good enough so that it could support a poor hit tool. 

Fabian was a .240 hitter in college, Honeycutt hit .293 for his career and .318 this year.  Fabian stole 24 bases in 4 seasons where Honeycutt stole 29 this last season.  This both are great athletes with some swing and miss but that is about the end of the comparison imo.  

[Rbiggs2525]

3 hours ago, bpilktree67 said:

Fabian was a .240 hitter in college, Honeycutt hit .293 for his career and .318 this year.  Fabian stole 24 bases in 4 seasons where Honeycutt stole 29 this last season.  This both are great athletes with some swing and miss but that is about the end of the comparison imo.  

Agreed, very sloppy comparison. Ryan Ohearn hit 195 with 30% strikeout percentage for multiple years. Orioles believe they can fix certain hitters with specific tools. Vance Honeycutt was the best player in college baseball the last month of the season.

[OriolesUpAndDowns]

I think this is a good pick at 22.  Anybody taken here is going to have some flaws.  But f he can get his K’s diwn, he has star potential.  
 

That’s a big thing to overcome but the odds of anyone taken at 22 making it are low anyway.  

[baltfan]

1 hour ago, Rbiggs2525 said:

Agreed, very sloppy comparison. Ryan Ohearn hit 195 with 30% strikeout percentage for multiple years. Orioles believe they can fix certain hitters with specific tools. Vance Honeycutt was the best player in college baseball the last month of the season.

o’Hearn was hurt more by the shift than any player in baseball

[Malike]

Carlos Collazo from BA wrote about Honeycutt.

“If he hits, he’s going to be a superstar. If he doesn’t hit, I still think he can be a valuable player,” Baseball America‘s Carlos Collazo said on Glenn Clark Radio July 17. “… There’s bust risk here, but it’s also a high-upside pick that you kind of have to take a little bit of that risk to access the tools at pick 22.”

Honeycutt, listed at 6-foot-3 and 205 pounds, has the best tools in the draft class along with No. 9 overall pick Konnor Griffin, Collazo said.

Honeycutt’s arm strength, speed and raw power could have made him a top-10 pick, especially considering that Collazo called him the best defensive center fielder in the class. However, his 26.3% career strikeout rate is the highest of any player drafted out of a four-year university in the top 30 in MLB history, according to Baseball America.

Scouts were alarmed, and Honeycutt fell into the 20s as a result. The Orioles, known for their ability to develop hitters, believe they can fix him, though.

“I think for Vance, specifically, the Orioles [are] a pretty great organizational fit,” Collazo said, “just given their track record of improving a lot of hitters in their system. I don’t think I could name maybe five other teams that would be a better fit in terms of my belief in them figuring out the hit tool.”

However, with the Orioles selecting outfielders with their first two draft picks last year, many wonder why they did not target a pitcher in the first round. But with No. 15 overall pick Jurrangelo Cijntje and No. 20 overall pick Trey Yesavage off the board, Collazo said a pitcher would have been a reach.

“Vance Honeycutt was the best player available for the Orioles when they were picking,” he said. “I don’t think that, regardless of your organizational strengths and weaknesses, especially in the first round, it’s worth just pivoting off the best player just to take a profile that you have less of, because, again, trades exist. … I think just collecting as much talent as possible is always a successful strategy.”

Edited July 21 by Malike

[Rbiggs2525]

11 hours ago, baltfan said:

o’Hearn was hurt more by the shift than any player in baseball

What about his K rate dropping from 28% to 11%. I would think that would boost your numbers too.

[Frobby]

I don’t know if the O’s will be able to fix Honeycutt or not, but it’s worth the risk.  He seems like he’s likely to make the majors even if he can’t really be fixed, and could be a well above average starter if he can be fixed to a decent degree.  I’m not usually someone who likes guys with a poor hit tool, but at 22 this was a good gamble.  

[Jim'sKid26]

12 minutes ago, Frobby said:

I don’t know if the O’s will be able to fix Honeycutt or not, but it’s worth the risk.  He seems like he’s likely to make the majors even if he can’t really be fixed, and could be a well above average starter if he can be fixed to a decent degree.  I’m not usually someone who likes guys with a poor hit tool, but at 22 this was a good gamble.  

Would you feel better about this pick if they saved ~$300,000 -$500,000 against his slot value? He's unlikely to go back to UNC for his senior year. I think the O's could save quite a bit of money. @Frobby you've been in tough negotiations before your retirement. Do you think the O's have the ability and desire to save money on this pick? 

[baltfan]

2 hours ago, Rbiggs2525 said:

What about his K rate dropping from 28% to 11%. I would think that would boost your numbers too.

He was good last year and his K rate was 22%.   He recently said that the abolition of the shift helped him a ton.

[Frobby]

10 minutes ago, Jim'sKid26 said:

Would you feel better about this pick if they saved ~$300,000 -$500,000 against his slot value? He's unlikely to go back to UNC for his senior year. I think the O's could save quite a bit of money. @Frobby you've been in tough negotiations before your retirement. Do you think the O's have the ability and desire to save money on this pick? 

Tough to say.  I suspect the O’s understood what it would take to sign him before they made the pick.   

[OriolesMagic83]

The way Elias about jumped out of his shoes when he got Honeycutt, I would say he is a very strong believer in this young man's skill set and has a specific plan to fix things to make him a very good major leaguer.

[oriolediehard]

Did Honeycutt sign?  It shows his name in bold, but I can't find any more information and how much he signed for??