Right-handed pitcher Mason Hickman was one of the stars of Vanderbilt's 2019 national championship baseball team. He makes our rankings of the top 100 players we've covered at No. 31. Here's a link to the full countdown.
Honors and awards: 2018 first-team Freshman All-American (Collegiate Baseball)
2018 Southeastern Conference Pitcher of the Week (Week 7)
In the VU record book: Single-season ERA: seventh (2.05 in 2019)
Single-season strikeouts: seventh (129 in 2019)
Before VU: Starred at Hendersonville's (Tenn.) Pope John Paul III High School, where he was a three-time all-state pick. Was a 2017 Mr. Baseball finalist. Also lettered twice in basketball. Ranked the No. 122 overall recruit in the Class of 2017 by Perfect Game.
Freshman (2018): Pitched mostly on Sundays for a 35-27 (16-14 SEC) team that lost in the Nashville Super Regional. Led the team with eight wins. Picked up a win in the deciding game of the Clemson Regional by giving up five earned runs in five innings, with five strikeouts and two walks. Gave up three earned runs in six innings of a no-decision vs. South Carolina. Picked up a win against Missouri, throwing seven innings without allowing an earned run, with four strikeouts and no walks. Got a win over Georgia with 6 2/3 innings, striking out six while allowing three earned runs. Pitched a seven-inning, complete-game, two-hit shutout of LSU, with nine strikeouts and two walks. Won at Mississippi St., allowing three earned runs in five innings with four strikeouts. Beat Duke in his first collegiate appearance; he gave up no earned runs and struck out seven over five innings.
Sophomore (2019): Pitched 20 times, making 13 starts, for a 59-12 (23-7) team that won the SEC, the SEC Tournament and the College World Series. In SEC regular-season play, threw four innings, allowing two earned runs, with two walks and six strikeouts. Struck out at least nine in five of last six starts, gave up no more than four hits in nine of his last 10 starts and allowed no more than two runs in 12 of his last 13 starts. Ranked 13th nationally in strikeouts (129) and 20th in WHIP (0.95), and 20th nationally (and fourth in the SEC) in ERA. Was went 2-0 with a 1.57 ERA across 23 innings in the NCAA Tournament. That included six scoreless innings against Louisville in the College World Series, and six innings of one-run ball to beat Michigan (with 10 strikeouts) and win the national title. Gave up one run in six innings to beat Auburn in the SEC Tournament. Struck out 10 and allowed two runs (both unearned) in five innings to beat MTSU. Beat Lipscomb with eight strikeouts over six scoreless innings. Defeated Belmont with 12 Ks over six scoreless innings. Picked up a win with three scoreless innings vs. Dayton.
Junior (2020): Made three appearances, all starts. Was a first-team preseason All-American by Collegiate Baseball and ranked the No. 30 player in the college game by Baseball America in the preseason. Struck out 12 vs. Illinois-Chicago (picked up a win with seven scoreless innings) and 11 against Hawaii (got the win in 6 1/3 innings of one-run ball). Threw five scoreless innings in a no-decision in the season opener vs. Michigan.
Final thoughts, and why I ranked him where I did: These rankings are assembled based on an athlete's body of work at Vanderbilt. Adjustments are made for length of career (sometimes, players go pro early, and thus may appear ahead of guys who accumulated better stats but did so because they were in college longer) and obviously the significance of those contributions (for instance, whether you contributed at big moments with championships on the line, and such). Mostly, I give players little credit for missed time due to other circumstances (suspensions, injuries, etc.). That may seem unfair, but so is life; those speak to whether a coach can count on the player to perform his job for reasons that relate to durability, or some sort of off-field trouble.
But where I make an exception is in the outlier that was the spring of 2020 due to COVID-19. In this case, it had nothing to do with Mason Hickman's inability to perform his job.
So, it's worth asking: What kind of season would Hickman have had under normal circumstances? And barring complications from an oblique injury (he was expected back for the SEC opener), it's hard to imagine 2020 wouldn't have been a fantastic season for Hickman.
In three 2020 starts, he was giving up just over one base runner per two innings. He had an obscene 39 percent strikeout rate, and a free pass rate of five percent; he wasn't going to sustain those (or at least not the first) because the competition was about to get tougher, but still, that's an other-worldly level of effectiveness. That came on the heels of a stretch when he literally had just one "off" outing in his last 13 starts of 2019. And even that outing wasn't bad; Hickman allowed seven hits and one walk, striking out nine while giving up four runs (all earned) in an April 2, 2019 start in which he got a no-decision in VU's extra-inning win over Western Kentucky.
In other words: Hickman, a preseason All-American, was pitching like one, and then some. It's not out of line to presume we'd have seen more of it.
There's also Hickman coming up huge against Louisville in Omaha, and then getting himself out of a bases-loaded, nobody-out jam against Michigan in the CWS final with just one run, and then flattening the Wolverines for the next five innings.
If you'd like to project a bit, Hickman was a good bet to end up in the top-five in career strikeouts and wins at VU, maybe in the top five in ERA (and a great bet for the top 10 there) and probably just outside the top 10 in wins. And Hickman may get the chance to achieve all that, pending the outcome of this summer's five-round MLB Draft.
Combine that with what he did to help VU win a national title in 2019, that's probably a top-20 overall résumé for this list. I couldn't quite do that because Hickman hadn't done it, but that's the reason I have him so high even if the body of work lags behind some trailing him on this list.
