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JD Thompson (Photo by David Buono/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Every Vanderbilt pitcher hears what used to be said behind closed doors. The praise, the critiques, the mechanical notes, the mindset tips—all of it now shared in front of a packed and sharply attentive room.
Commodores pitching coach Scott Brown still talks as if it’s just him and the pitcher, the same one-on-one meeting he’s held with Vanderbilt pitchers for over a decade. Only now, that room includes his entire pitching staff.
They call it the “brain trust.”
Every pitcher sits in. Every outing is dissected aloud. Wins, losses and bullpen sessions all get the same treatment. While Brown still talks like he’s meeting one-on-one, everyone else listens, learns and is expected to speak up.
“It just built this sense of trust and community,” Brown told Baseball America. “We’re a vulnerable pitching staff, but we’re also a tough one. Because we’re honest. We tell each other the truth. There’s nowhere to hide anymore.”
It’s a small cultural shift with big competitive consequences.
For the Commodores, the pitching staff has become its own ecosystem, an idea marketplace that fuels technical growth, accountability and shared language. It’s also symbolic of something bigger: Vanderbilt is changing.
“This has been a very rewarding year for me, personally,” Brown said. “Not just in how our pitchers have performed, but in how they’ve supported each other. We’ve got a lot of really good minds here. Not just from the coaches, but inside the staff. And that’s made all the difference.”
From the outside, this team might not look like the ones that preceded it.
Gone are the frontline flamethrowers with top 10 fastballs and surefire first-round pedigrees. In their place is a group that shares more in common with an orchestra than a demolition crew.
It’s sharp, coordinated and tuned to the moment.
“We weren’t sure if we were going to have the real frontline-type guys that we’ve had in the past,” Brown said. “That’s not to take away from anybody that we have. It’s just, when you have guys like Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker fronting your rotation, they set the bar really high.”
So Brown, entering his 13th season in the Vanderbilt coaches room, did something unconventional. He built backward. He filled his staff with arms that had pitch packages, not just power profiles. He…