By R.L. Bynum
Center fielder Vance Honeycutt is one of the most decorated players in Carolina baseball history and topped that off this week as one of four winners of the school’s prestigious Patterson Medal.
He did it all at UNC, from hitting a school-record 65 home runs and consistently saving runs with his outstanding range on defense to becoming the only Power 5 conference player in NCAA history with at least 60 home runs and at least 70 steals (76).
Those numbers impress MLB scouts, but their reservations have Honeycutt curiously falling from a projected top-5 pick a year ago to between the middle and the bottom of the first round for Sunday’s MLB Draft in Fort Worth, Texas (6 p.m., ESPN).
The two-time ACC Defensive Player of the Year, who made multiple All-America first teams, is one of the two most “polarizing” first-round prospects (along with Kentucky shortstop Ryan Waldschmidt), according to Kiley McDaniel, an ESPN MLB insider and draft expert.
Whoever picks Honeycutt will get a talented prospect who will no doubt be eager to prove that other teams were wrong to pass on him. He proved to be a clutch hitter with multiple game-winning hits during the Tar Heels’ run to the College World Series.
“Scouts love how it looks, and then the numbers guys hate how it has happened at the plate,” McDaniel said. “Honeycutt will go to more of an old-school team or a team that really values the sports-sciency athletic elements.”
Carlos Collazo of Baseball America lists Honeycutt as the No. 13 draft prospect, and Jonathan Mayo of mlb.com projects him as the 17th pick. However, D1 Baseball projects Honeycutt as the No. 25 pick, with Keith Law of The Athletic and McDaniel having him going No. 27 to the Philadelphia Phillies.
He’s one of three Tar Heels who could be picked in the first three rounds, along with two who had outstanding redshirt sophomore seasons — left fielder Casey Cook and reliever Dalton Pence.
Why did Honeycutt’s projections fall after hitting a career-high .318 last season? McDaniel said that scouts didn’t start to dig deeper into Honeycutt until the last year or so and that he wasn’t scouted as much in high school because he “was a football guy.”
It’s well-documented that while his home run total soared from 12 during his injury-shortened sophomore season to a school-record 28 last season, his strikeout total went from 51 to an ACC-high 83.
McDaniel said that last season’s strikeout rate of 27.4% and his swings and misses on pitches in the strike zone aren’t specifically what raised red flags for MLB teams.
“That’s been the evidence of what the concern is,” said McDaniel, adding that some teams don’t like what they see from Honeycutt’s swing. “If I could visually give it to you, the idea with the swing is to sort of always be at a slight angle. 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.”
Scouts kept watching his at-bats, but he said they didn’t see a lot of improvement.
“He tweaks with the setup but doesn’t get to this actual issue here,” McDaniel said. “The pitch selection is good, then it turns bad, and then it turns good again.
“These sort of conversations, he might be an 80 grade —one of the best in baseball — defender,” he said. “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.”
Teams wonder, according to McDaniel, whether Honeycutt will be like Kevin Pillar, Jose Siri, Cristian Pache or Drew Stubbs — a right-handed-hitting center fielder who doesn’t hit for average but does everything else well and plays outstanding defense. Will he be like former Durham Bull Kevin Kiermaier (who Toronto waived on Friday), Harrison Bader or Louis Robert, who have all carved out good MLB careers?
But McDaniel said Honeycutt could be a guy who hits .210 in Triple-A and never makes it to the major leagues.
“If you can look up his in-zone miss rate, it’s really bad, especially in college,” McDaniel said. “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.”
Honeycutt shot up the draft boards after he hit .296 with 25 home runs, 58 RBI and 29 steals in his first season as a Tar Heel in 2022.
“He went from, ‘Oh, this guy could go [No.] 1’ — 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,” McDaniel said. “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.”
Law writes that Honeycutt might be a good fit for the Minnesota Twins at No. 21 and that he’s heard that the Baltimore Orioles, who have the No. 22 pick, could be looking for college hitters, with Honeycutt mentioned as a possibility.
The Houston Astros have picked college hitters in the first round the last two seasons — Nebraska shortstop Brice Matthews in 2023 and Tennessee outfielder Drew Gilbert in 2022 — and McDaniel said that they are “tied to” Honeycutt. The Astros’ first pick isn’t until No. 28.
D1 Baseball projects Cook as the 55th pick and Pence (who went 5–1 with a 2.45 ERA and eight saves last season) as the 92nd pick.
McDaniel compares Cook to Tennessee left fielder Dylan Dreiling, whom D1 Baseball projects as the 23rd pick. He says he wouldn’t be surprised to see Cook picked near the end of the second round but more likely in the third round or the top of the fourth round.
McDaniel said that Cook is “a high-probability college guy without a ton of ceiling because the position and the tools and stuff are not great,” McDaniels said. “But some people are convinced this might be one of the easiest-to-project-to-the-big-leagues bats in the draft. There’s just not a whole lot else going on beyond the hit tool.”
Cook hit .341 with a .431 on-base percentage, a .605 slugging percentage and a 1.036 OPS with 12 doubles, 18 home runs and 78 RBI last season, all career-highs.
Photo courtesy of UNC Athletics
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