Vanderbilts Scott Brown, a story and voice that should not be forgotten

Before Tim Corbin violated one of his own rules — the dugout belongs to the kids during games — and gathered them together for a verbal inferno, before Javier Vaz took a pitch most wouldn’t be able to take, before Spencer Jones found pinch-hitting magic, before Enrique Bradfield ripped the tying single, before the Stanford wild pitch that turned certain Vanderbilt defeat into staggering Vanderbilt victory, before a postgame locker room that featured more stares of disbelief than scenes of jubilation, Corbin turned to Scott Brown in that dugout.

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“Corbs,” Brown said to his boss, “I don’t like their eyes.”

Brown, Vanderbilt’s pitching coach and associate head coach, had just been to the mound Wednesday. He had addressed relief pitcher Nick Maldonado and his teammates amid a mistake-filled fourth inning that left the Commodores down 4-0 and drifting from today’s reality: playing NC State in the College World Series semifinals in Omaha after a 6-5 shocker of the Cardinal. And he had done this so many times before, quietly collaborating with Corbin on a decision in a big moment, using the skills that got him this job before the 2013 season. He’s been around for both Vanderbilt national championships and four of its five CWS appearances, and that’s a lot of recruiting, scouting reports, developed pitchers and called pitches. Better yet, it’s a lot of understanding, and reaching, people.

“He’s had so much to do with the growth of this,” Corbin said of Brown on Thursday, a day after one of the wildest wins they’ve shared together. “Brownie is someone you lean on for their instincts about people. I don’t ever, ever talk to the guys in a game, unless it’s encouraging. Never. It’s their space, it’s their game, and the last thing I want as an adult is to get in their way. But he felt it right there, and so did I. They needed to be shaken up.”

The response, regardless of whether it ultimately led to victory, is what this program is. Brown, 43, has a hand in it that should not be overlooked. And an outlook that can’t be explained without understanding what he has lost.

Before they were married in 2006, Brown and the former Mary Beyrouty lived for three years in separate rooms at her parents’ house in Williston Park, N.Y., on Long Island. They had met at the State University of New York at Cortland on the west side of the state, where he was a Division III All-American in 1999 as a lefty pitcher with a 9-1 record, 2.03 ERA and 82 mph fastball. She was an aspiring teacher getting her graduate degree, and he was a Cortland volunteer baseball assistant who was getting paid good money as an administrator who planned events and taught classes.

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“But I wanted to be a baseball coach,” he said, and legendary St. John’s coach Ed Blankmeyer gave him that opportunity.

“Scott’s like, ‘How far do your parents live from St. John’s?’” Mary recalled. “I say, ‘Uh, 20 minutes. You have to take this.’”

Then Scott mentioned the pay: $9,453 per year, or a fraction of what he was making at Cortland.

“I’m like, ‘You’re screwed,’” Mary said, but they made the jump and she started her teaching career while he quickly started building a reputation as a top pitching coach even in what was technically a part-time gig.

By the time Scott and Mary got married, his salary had doubled. And that’s roughly what they had paid in rent in three years of living with her parents — $250 apiece per month. On their wedding day, the Beyroutys surprised them by giving them all that money back as a gift.

“I still think about that, how incredible that is,” Brown said. “They were teaching us something.”

The St. John’s job grew into a full-time, full-paying position, and the Browns moved into their own home nearby. Brown coached four pitchers who ended up making it to the majors and was building a reputation as a recruiter and developer of talent. He had never met Corbin until they were the first two to show up to a tournament and major recruiting event at Rutgers in 2007. They sat together all day watching games and talking baseball. They would not talk again until five years later when Corbin — a longtime friend of Blankmeyer’s — called to see if Brown would like to join him at Vanderbilt. In those years between, the Browns started a family.

Nolan was 2 years old on Nov. 12, 2010, the day his little sister Peyton Riley Brown was born. As with Nolan, Mary’s pregnancy was free of issues. She was full term and she knew Peyton was coming, so the Browns went to NYU Winthrop Hospital in Mineola. All was going as planned until doctors came into the Browns’ room and said Mary was going to need an emergency C-section. They got her out of there fast.

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“I’d been a coach for a long time by then,” Brown said, “and I could see on their faces that something was wrong.”

Meconium is the thick, dark substance that fills a baby’s intestines before birth, and it is supposed to come out in bowel movements after birth. Peyton passed meconium in the womb with the worst possible outcome, meconium aspiration syndrome. She was unable to breathe for nearly eight minutes as doctors worked to deliver her.

“I’m in the waiting room and everything is going through my mind, and the first thought was that I was concerned about my wife more than anything,” Brown said. “I wasn’t really thinking anything was wrong with the baby. They finally came out and said our baby girl was delivered, Mary was sleeping, they didn’t give me many details. So I sat there a little while longer, but when Mary woke up, she knew. It was the worst day of my life. You go from Nolan’s birth, that jubilation of having a child come into the world, thinking you’re going to watch it again, that uncontrollable joy, to complete devastation in no time. But we looked at each other that day and said, ‘We’re not going to ask why.’ And that’s kind of how I view my life and go through my daily processes.”

Peyton had no brain activity. She was on life support. The Browns spent five days with her. On Nov. 17, 2010, they took pictures of her and sat in her NICU room with their mothers. A doctor unplugged Peyton and handed her to Mary.

“I couldn’t even do it,” Mary said. “I had to give her to Scott.”

Peyton passed away in about a minute, Mary said.

“Nolan was our rock,” Scott said. “We poured our hearts into him and leaned on him, and he probably helped us carry on, because we had to. Not that we wouldn’t have otherwise, but it had to happen at a faster rate.”

“He was maybe the main thing that got us through that whole entire year,” Mary said of Nolan, now 12 years old.

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Scott said Peyton’s “spirit is still rocking and rolling” in the Brown family, and he posted this message on Twitter to her on Nov. 17, 2019, nine years after her passing: “I will never ask why but I know what has come after that day has been very special and we probably have you to thank for that. Only hope you know baby girl that not a day goes by where we don’t celebrate or think of you. One day you will hopefully be able to tell me why but until then…keep looking over us! #ThankfulBeyondWords #wewillhelpothers”

Tragedy was not finished with the Brown family in 2010. A few weeks after Peyton’s death, Brown’s mother, Patricia, died suddenly of a heart condition at age 58. The Browns’ 8-year-old twin daughters are named Kelsey Peyton and Riley Patricia. They were born a couple of months before Scott got the job with Vanderbilt. And they were born nearly 10 weeks early, via emergency C-section, in the same NICU where Peyton passed away. At Peyton’s funeral, the Browns asked for donations to that NICU, in appreciation of all that was done for them during Peyton’s brief life.

“You think about paying it forward and the opportunities that are presented through a traumatic experience,” Scott said. “It’s one of those things that, life’s just amazing when you start to think about it that way.”

In the moment, it was another scary situation at the NICU, the twins passing amniotic fluid back and forth. Kelsey’s heartbeat was lost briefly, and when she was delivered she wasn’t crying at first — she had fluid in her nose. Doctors took her away immediately, but she was fine. Both were and have had normal growth after entering the world at four pounds, two ounces (Kelsey) and three pounds, six ounces (Riley). Emma, the youngest Brown at 5 and the only one born in Nashville, makes four kids. Scott and Mary were planning on stopping at two.

And that’s what they’ve told their three daughters, that Peyton made it possible for them to be here. They celebrate her, they think of her in heaven, and Mary said the twins were telling a friend about her just this week. On Peyton’s birthday each year, they get out the pictures they took that day in the NICU.

“We try not to make it a sad thing,” Mary said. “It hurts still, but we do, we’ve celebrated her birthday by releasing balloons one year, we made cupcakes another year. This past year marked 10 years, which is crazy. But we always want to keep her in mind.”

Normally, the family would be all together this week, in Vanderbilt gear, cheering on the Commodores as they attempt to defend their 2019 national championship. But Mary and the girls have flown back home because Nolan, 12, a pitcher and first baseman, is on a South Nashville All-Stars team that is playing this weekend to advance toward the Little League World Series. As much as Brown would love to be there in person, he’s hoping he’ll have to catch this weekend’s action on a Facebook Live stream.

Brown has had “multiple inquiries,” he said, from major league teams seeking pitching coaches, and he said he has thought about what it would be like to run his own program but has no urgency to seek out such an opportunity. It’s obviously possible he could be a strong candidate some day to replace Corbin, who turns 60 in August. Though that task will be daunting for whoever gets it.

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“What I’ve found out about Corbs is that every day, his energy is incredible,” Brown said. “It’s preached often by people, but it’s rarely modeled and done. Every day you see him, he brings it. Thoughts, ideas, training plans, it’s everything. Working with him has showed me that there’s so much more to baseball results that come from character traits than I realized. You can have some really good things, but you’re leaving it to chance if those things aren’t important. The best way to describe Coach Corbin is that he’s a daily vitamin for the most important muscle in your body, your brain. A daily vitamin for how you attack things.”

Corbin’s description for Brown is “best friend.”

“I don’t know many people who say, ‘That guy I work with is my best friend,’ but he is,” Corbin said. “Brownie, (assistant coach David) Macias, (assistant coach Mike) Baxter, they’re my best friends and we exchange conversations about everything. Not about baseball. And Brownie is such a good man in so many ways.”

Corbin has had just two pitching coaches — his first, Derek Johnson, left in 2012 to become minor league pitching coordinator for the Chicago Cubs and is now the Cincinnati Reds pitching coach — and Corbin said both were chosen in part because of their philosophies on rest and arm care for pitchers. Brown calls every pitch during games, sitting in the dugout with a mountain of information in front of him and sending three numbers to catcher CJ Rodriguez to signify each pitch — the type of pitch and the location. Rodriguez said he has a card on his wrist with corresponding numbers that change each game and “hundreds of little squares” for the various combinations.

“He’s taught me so much on the mental side of baseball, the pitch-calling side, how to understand hitters,” Rodriguez said of Brown. “It feels like every day there’s something new that I’m learning from him or our pitchers are learning from him about the game.”

Rodriguez and those pitchers are free to object to Brown’s calls, by the way. Brown said he’s never been “my way or the highway” on calling pitches because it’s essential that the guy throwing the ball has belief in what he’s about to throw. What he wants are pitchers who are team-oriented, competitive and driven to improve their crafts. That certainly describes the two stars and soon-to-be high draft picks he is coaching this season, junior Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter.

“Also, they’re both pretty good,” Brown said, and Vanderbilt is expected to give the ball to Rocker for today’s game, in an attempt to force another game Saturday, the winner advancing to the final series.

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The sequence of events that got it to that, and the corresponding emotions, were still resonating Thursday as the Commodores sought ways to avenge Monday’s 1-0 loss to NC State — which spoiled a masterful 15-strikeout complete game from Leiter.

“That’s a game that pulls from all your resources as a person,” Corbin said of Wednesday’s win.

“I’m not sure it’s kicked in yet,” Rodriguez said. “When you go from so low to so high in such a short amount of time, it’s like, ‘Wow.’ There were some guys in our locker room afterward that were just sitting there in disbelief, just shock on their face. I mean look, our season was over with one more strike. But that’s why we do what we do and stress consistency every day. We train for moments like that.”

And in extreme moments, they still need to be shaken up. Freshman pitcher Christian Little brought anger into the dugout after a two-error first inning behind him Thursday. Brown pounced on it and rebuked Little, he said, because, “That’s something we don’t tolerate at Vanderbilt, you’re not on an island here.

“That was just a teaching moment, and it was more about emotional control than anything else,” Brown said. “You have to keep your mind on what you want to do and on your team (as a pitcher). You have to. I call it being at the center of the universe. You have to demonstrate to everybody, ‘I’m here.’ And when your mind goes haywire on some things and isn’t focused in the right direction, you have to change it fast.”

Little, whose stuff is lethal and future is bright, gave Vanderbilt a good three innings other than one big mistake. Still, it was slipping away from Vanderbilt in the top of the fourth. Brown could see it on the faces of his players. He would tell Corbin, and Corbin would do something he almost never does, and Vanderbilt would get a Dom Keegan two-run homer in the bottom of the fourth and go on to an all-timer of a win.

Before all that, Brown looked at Maldonado and the infielders around him and told them to look into his eyes.

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“No, no, no,” Brown said. “We are not going to succumb to this.”

(Top photo: Courtesy of Vanderbilt Athletics)

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