Jumping from Division III to the highest level of Division I baseball isn’t supposed to be easy, yet Virginia Tech OF Ben Watson made it look that way. After an impressive season with the Hokies, Watson earned one of the highest honors available to a college baseball player.
Ben Watson earns Third Team All-American honors. Incredible season after making the jump from D3 to the best league in all of college baseball #Hokies https://t.co/0fZFnloKzd
— Tim Thomas (@TimThomasTLP) June 12, 2024
Ben Watson was named a Third Team All-American by the National College Baseball Writers Association. Watson is the seventh Hokie to earn at least one All-American honor this decade after Ian Seymour and Carson Taylor earned All-American in 2020 and the group of Gavin Cross, Tanner Schobel, Jack Hurley, and Drue Hackenberg earned All-American honors in 2022.
This comes after Watson put together a dominant season during which he had a .429 batting average, four home runs, 48 RBIs, 21 doubles, three triples, a .466 on-base percentage, and a .595 slugging percentage while striking out only 24 times over the course of 222 at-bats. He also had a .984 fielding percentage with only two errors. His 93 hits this past season set a new Virginia Tech single-season record.
Watson dominated the D3 level batting .486 as a junior in 2023 for Elizabethtown, but I don’t think anyone outside of Watson could have imagined that he’d be able to transfer into the toughest league in college baseball, and continue to be an elite hitter. However, that’s exactly what Watson did, dominating at the plate and most likely pushing himself into being drafted this summer after being completely off the radar prior to transferring to Virginia Tech.
