Preseason All-American Dylan Beavers Leads Cal Baseball into 2022 Season

Bears picked to finish sixth in Pac-12 and open their season on Friday

Dylan Beavers came to Cal expecting to be a pitcher, but he is now the hitting star and top pro prospect of a Bears baseball team that begins play Friday and hopes to make the NCAA postseason tournament after barely missing out last season.

Cal is picked to finish sixth in the 11-team Pac-12 in the preseason coaches poll, which would put the Bears on the border of making the NCAA tournament this year.

The Bears' prospects might have been brighter if Torrey Pines High School shortstop Carson Williams, who had committed to Cal, had not been drafted late in the first round of the 2021 Major League Baseball draft, causing him to sign with the Tampa Bay Rays rather than attend Cal.

The Bears need big seasons from their two stars -- outfielder Beavers and pitcher Josh White, who were two of the seven Pac-12 players named to the preseason watch list for the Golden Spikes Award, which goes to the nation’s top college player.

Beavers had a breakout 2021 season, and is now projected to be a first-round selection in the 2022 Major League Baseball draft.

ProspectsLive.com pegs Beavers to be taken with the 17th overall pick, MyMLBDraft.com predicts Beavers will be the 20th selection, and MLB.com ranks Beavers as the 24th-best pro prospect with this assessment:

Scouting grades:

Hit: 45 | Power: 55 | Run: 55 | Arm: 55 | Field: 50 | Overall: 50

The college ranks in northern California have a pair of toolsy, left-handed-hitting outfielders, both with considerable upside. One is Brock Jones from Stanford and the other is Beavers, who hit 18 homers and slugged .630 at Cal in 2021. Many scouts thought Beavers fit in the same conversation as Jones, though a rough summer in the Cape Cod League and with USA Baseball has led to some concerns.

When Beavers is locked in, he’s the proverbial five-tool player. During the spring of 2021, he reminded some scouts of Christian Yelich as a left-handed hitter who makes good swing decisions and hard contact in the strike zone. But using a bit of an unorthodox setup with lower hand positioning, he does have some timing issues and there are some holes in his swing. He was tied up inside at times over the summer. He was streaky in the fall, though he did show some flashes of brilliance, especially getting to his easily plus raw power.

While he’s big at 6-foot-4, Beavers is an above-average runner who has the chance to stay in center field, though his near-plus arm would work just fine in right. He hasn’t received a ton of instruction in terms of making adjustments mechanically at the plate, but there will be teams willing to look past the hit risk and bank on helping him tap into all of his tools at the next level.

“His tools really stand out,” Cal head coach Mike Neu said of Beavers in the video atop this story. “With his speed, his athleticism, his power, his arm strength. [But] he’s still scratching the surface of what he can be.”

Beavers, a first-team preseason All-America selection by the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association and a second-team preseason pick by Baseball America, led the Pac-12 in home runs last season with 18 and helped the Bears finish seventh in the 11-team Pac-12 last season.

However, only six Pac-12 teams were selected for the national playoffs, and Cal, which might have made the postseason field if it had won its final game, stayed home.

“We felt like we were playing our best baseball at the end of the season last year,” Neu said.

Beavers and White note the Bears cannot afford a slow start like last year, when they finished 29-26 overall and 15-15 in the Pac-12.

Beavers says the team is better prepared to have a strong start.

“I think just having a fall; last year we weren’t on campus for the fall, so that, whatever it was, four months was really huge for us,” said Beavers, who is on the left in the video below. Josh White is on the right.

The Bears return six of their eight starting position players, but lose Darren Baker and Quentin Selma, and their pitching should be solid with White becoming a starter this season after working as the closer most of last season. White has great stuff; it’s just a matter of whether he can control it.

Two other things are different from last season – the schedule and the first Pac-12 tournament.

Being unable to schedule games outside the West Coast last year because of the pandemic probably hurt the Bears' RPI and their chances of landing a postseason berth.

But next month Cal is scheduled to play a three-game series at Florida State, which is No. 11 in the D1Baseball preseason rankings.

The other difference is that the Pac-12 will have a tournament at the end of the regular season for the first time. The Pac-12 and the Big West had been the only college baseball conferences that did not have a baseball tournament, but the Pac-12 is on board this season. Only the top eight finishers will participate in the Pac-12 tournament, which will be held in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the spring training home of the San Francisco Giants.

“Hopefully it preps us a little bit more for postseason potentially and maybe gives another team an opportunity to get in there,” Neu said.

Cal and the other 10 Pac-12 teams all open their seasons on Friday, with the Bears beginning the season at the same site at which they will end it – Scottsdale, Arizona.

The Bears open the MLB4 Tournament against Houston on Friday, then face 17th-ranked TCU on Saturday.

With Major League Baseball looking like it might not start as scheduled because of a possible lockout, college baseball may get more attention than usual this year.

Mike Neu's general comments about his 2022 team:

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Cover photo of Dylan Beavers courtesy of Cal Athletics

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Follow Jake Curtis of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jakecurtis53

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