Two Virginia Tech Baseball Players Receive All-American Honors

Photo Credit: Dave Knachel/Virginia Tech Athletics

Although Virginia Tech’s Baseball season came to an abrupt end in mid-March, two Hokies still displayed dominant performances this season that allowed them to gain a high praise of recognition.

Junior pitcher Ian Seymour and sophomore catcher Carson Taylor were selected as Third-team Division I All-Americans earlier this week, marking the first time any Hokie has received All-American honor since Tyler Horan back in 2013. It is also the first time Virginia Tech has had a pair of players on the same team to be named to All-American status since 2003 when Matt Dalton and Marc Tugwell were both elected onto the team.

During the shortened season, Seymour was named twice as the Collegiate Baseball National Player of the Week on February 24th and March 9th. The left-handed pitcher led the Hokies with forty strikeouts and posted the best record on the team with a 3-0 record.

Seymour’s most dominant performance of the year came on March 8th down in Atlanta where he struck out 14 batters against the #29 Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in a 7-6 Hokies victory.

In all four outings this season, Seymour struck out at least six batters in which also included an 11-strikeout performance against the Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns on February 23rd.

Out of 20.1 innings he pitched, 16 of them were scoreless while eight of those were perfect frames. Seymour finished the season nationally-ranked in several categories, including fourth in strikeouts per inning (17.70), 18th in strikeouts and 23rd in wins.

If Seymour was a machine on the mound, then Taylor was a tank in the batter’s box for the Hokies this season.

Leading the team in almost every offensive statistical category this season, Taylor posted a .431 batting average, 25 hits including 7 doubles and 2 home runs which were allocated for a total of 40 bases.

Taylor also scored 19 runs and recorded 20 RBIs for the Hokies this season, leading the team in both categories. He also had the clutch gene with scoring two game-winning runs and tallying in two game-winning RBIs for Virginia Tech.

Despite having an impressive resumé with his bat, Taylor also did not convert an error on the 137 chances that came his way during the season which helped him land his name on the 2020 Buster Posey National Collegiate Catcher of the Year Award Watch List.

Taylor finished nationally-ranked in major offensive categories including twenty-seventh in on-base percentage (.541), thirty-second in batting average and thirty-fifth in RBIs.

Even though we weren’t able to see the Hokies play throughout the entire course of their 2020 season, we got to catch a glimpse of the future in Blacksburg as both the talents of Seymour and Taylor could make a return to Virginia Tech next spring though that depends on whether Seymour is selected in the shortened 2020 MLB Draft.