2024 D1Baseball Preseason All-Americans

Season Preview D1Baseball Staff - January 29, 2024

SEE ALSO: College Top 100 Prospects | Preseason Top 25 Rankings

---

Get ready for the 2024 season by getting 24% off an Annual Subscription, HERE.

---

D1Baseball’s editors and national writers select the preseason All-America teams with one guiding principle in mind: to identify the best and most valuable college baseball players for the 2024 season. Past performance and future potential factor into the deliberations, but the goal is neither to identify the best future major leaguers nor to reward the players who have put up the gaudiest numbers in past seasons (particularly since the level of competition varies significantly from one conference to another). The objective is to select the players who would provide the most value for a team that wanted to win the College World Series in 2024 — the players who are best equipped to perform against elite college competition this spring.

Preseason No. 1 Wake Forest leads all teams with five preseason All-Americans, including two players on the first team: ace lefty Josh Hartle and first baseman Nick Kurtz. Hartle’s two expected weekend rotationmates, righties Michael Massey and Chase Burns, made the second team, and Division II transfer Seaver King cracked the third team after starring for Team USA and in the Cape Cod League last summer.

The only other team to place multiple players on the first team is South Carolina, with catcher Cole Messina and outfielder Ethan Petry.

Duke, Tennessee and TCU landed three players apiece across the three teams. LSU, Texas A&M, Florida, NC State, Virginia, Texas Tech and UC Santa Barbara each have two preseason All-Americans across the three teams.

Fourteen All-Americans from the 2023 postseason teams are back in college baseball, and all of them made the preseason All-America teams. Four players who earned first-team All-America honors in 2023 are back on the 2024 preseason first team: Hartle, West Virginia dynamo JJ Wetherholt, Florida two-way superstar Jac Caglianone, and Kansas State’s electrifying closer Tyson Neighbors. Five other players moved up from the postseason second team in 2023 to the preseason first team in 2024: Kurtz, Georgia slugger Charlie Condon, LSU megastar Tommy White, Arkansas ace Hagen Smith and East Carolina ace Trey Yesavage. Messina, Petry, Oregon State’s Travis Bazzana, and Duke’s Fran Oschell jump from the 2023 postseason third team to the 2024 preseason first team jump from the 2023 postseason third team to the 2024 preseason first team. TCU’s Payton Tolle was a third-team All-American last spring and moves up to the preseason second team heading into 2024.

Led by Wake Forest, the ACC leads all conferences with 17 preseason All-Americans in all, followed by the SEC (14), the Big 12 (nine), the Big West (three), and the Pac-12 and CAA (two apiece). The American, ASUN, Big Ten, Mountain West, Ohio Valley and Sun Belt have one All-American apiece, giving 12 different conferences representation on the three teams. The SEC leads all conferences with seven players on the first team, followed by the ACC (five) and Big 12 (two).