St. Joe’s baseball Head Coach Fritz Hamburg announced the hiring of Pat Brown on Feb. 9, who will serve as an assistant coach for the Hawks in the 2021 season.
Brown is a 2015 graduate from the State University of New York at Oswego, where he played five seasons of baseball for the Lakers. The Liverpool, New York native, who was on staff at Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, Tennessee for the 2020 season, returns to Pennsylvania after previous coaching stints at Bloomsburg University and Arcadia University.
Brown said he knows coaches within the college baseball community who hold the St. Joe’s baseball program in high regard, which made his decision to join the coaching staff an easy one.
“It seemed like a no brainer for me,” Brown said. “I’m just looking forward to working alongside Coach Hamburg and helping these guys get better everyday.”
In his previous coaching positions, Brown was tasked with working with pitchers, the same role he will be serving on Hawk Hill.
“They brought me in to help with the pitching staff,” Brown said. “This spring, I want to get to know the pitchers, build relationships with them and help develop them.”
According to Hamburg, Brown will provide an experienced coaching staff with new-school knowledge of a growing field within the game of baseball.
“He brings very good balance with respect to understanding analytics and data,” Hamburg said in a press release by SJU Athletics.
Brown said that using analytics and data is important for college baseball teams because when that information is utilized, player development is enhanced.
“As a young coach, it’s important to stay up on the newest information and be able to help your guys as much as possible,” Brown said.
Specifically, Brown uses analytics to help the pitchers he coaches. Matt Bradley, a junior pitcher at Carson-Newman University who pitched under Brown in the 2020 season, said Brown uses the cloud-based software Rapsodo to track data for pitchers, including factors like spin rate, spin efficiency axis and how different pitches move as they approach the batter.
“When we started, he got all of our numbers and really recognized what each guy needed to work on,” Bradley said. “For me, it was my slider. When I had more vertical break than horizontal break, I got more swinging misses. The whole fall, we worked on making sure that my slider had more vertical break than horizontal break.”
While Brown’s prowess in analytics simplifies the game for the pitchers he coaches, he also understands the importance of the mental aspect of baseball and tells his players to embrace competition, according to Bradley.
“He understands the analytical side of baseball, but when it’s game day, it’s all about competing,” Bradley said. “He’s a player’s coach. The guys at St. Joe’s are going to love him.”
In Brown’s first year of college baseball at the State University of Oswego, the Lakers went 1-17 in its conference, the SUNYAC. However, by the time Brown graduated in 2015, they had earned a bid to the NCAA Tournament in three straight years. Brown said that the program’s improvement over his college career emphasized the importance of having like-minded and selfless players on a team.
“That’s the most important thing on a team,” Brown said. “If you have 35 players who all have the same goal and are working for the guy next to them, you’re going to do some pretty special things.”
Though Brown has been with the team for only a few practices, he said he is encouraged by the habits the Hawks have and is excited to integrate himself into the program.
“They do an incredible job of working hard and being very businesslike,” Brown said. “I’m just excited to add into that piece and continue to build the culture.”
