Pondering change
After years of coaching with his mind on the offense, Brown is forced to coach ‘small ball’

By Brandon Ortiz
Skiff Staff

All-time winningest coach with 420 wins.

Two Southwest Conference Coach of the Year honors.

One SWC title.

Took TCU to its first NCAA Tournament berth since 1956in 1994.

Head coach Lance Brown is starting his 15th season at the helm of TCU’s baseball team. He is the Frogs’ all-time winningest coach with 420 wins.

Head coach Lance Brown has been able to accomplish some impressive feats in his time at TCU.

When Brown was hired in 1986, the Frogs were on their fifth coach in 12 years. Brown is now in his 15th year as coach.

“I am pleasantly surprised at being able to stay here as long as I have,” Brown said. “Maybe if we get our new field we will move into a new era.”

The highlight of his coaching career came in 1994 when his team went 14-4 in SWC play and won the title.

Times have changed, and the game has changed at TCU.

Since the 1994 season, the Frogs have only finished above .500 twice in conference play. The Frogs suffered through their worst overall season with Brown as head coach last season, going 22-34 and finishing next to last in the Western Athletic Conference.

The next step was to figure out where the problems were and fix them.

If you build it...

“It’s gotten difficult the last three or four years to recruit because of facilities,” Brown said. “We have gotten a lot of good athletes to come in here but when they see the facility — I think maybe that is the most important single item you have in recruiting.

“If you can’t play at night, if you don’t have a big-time stadium like these other people have, it just makes each year a little more difficult to get the top quality athletes in here.”

Brown said the lack of a “big-time” stadium has led to the program’s inability to attract top recruits. TCU can no longer compete for local area talent like it once did in the mid 1990s, he said.

“Years ago when (we were getting some of the) great players in the area, our facilities were as good as anybody other than Texas or (Texas) A&M,” Brown said. “We were on a run where we were recruiting this area and recruiting it well. (But), we have started losing out on those people and it has accumulated. You start to lose out on one or two people every year.

“So you sort of keep it together, but you sort of see it going downhill at the same time because you are not getting the same quality that you have before.”

But lack of a new stadium did not hinder Baylor and Rice, both nationally ranked programs, from having success before building new stadiums. Baylor posted a 41-20-1 record in 1998 and was 50-15 in 1999 after upgrading the Baylor Ballpark.
Rice went to the College World Series in 1999 at 59-15 and in 1998 with a 46-17 mark.

Brown said programs out of state, like Alabama, Louisiana State and Southern California, have also dipped into the Dallas/Fort Worth area talent pool.

“If you look at where (the top) players are going, they signed with (the top programs),” he said. “But if you bring a person over here that can go to Alabama, or to LSU, and you show them our facility (they’re not going to come here). I don’t care where they live. They could live one block from the campus, and they are not going to come here because they got better opportunity.”

Baylor managed to pluck Dallas/Fort Worth area gems like pitcher Chad Hawkins (11-5, 1.82 ERA) of Fort Worth Southwest and closer Zane Carlson (1-2, 2.28 ERA, 15 saves) of Highland Park. The Bears also recruited Jason Jennings, who was 1-3 with a 3.44 ERA at Double-A and 7-10 with a 3.47 ERA at Single-A last year in the Colorado Rockies’ minor league affiliates.

In it’s annual draft report card for the Rockies, Baseball America reported that Jennings had the best debut, best power and was closest to the majors.

Rice recruited serviceable right-hander Jeff Nichols from Duncanville. When Nichols was healthy, he was 15-4 with a 4.84 ERA in 1999.

Brown said he did not know if the promise of a new stadium is enough to get top recruits to TCU.

“It has been a struggle, and I don’t know if we can get people on the promise of a new stadium or if we have to get the stadium to get the people in here,” Brown said.

Until the new stadium is built, the program will try to develop players already on the squad and fill in holes with freshmen and junior college transfers, Brown said.

“Where we are right now, which is a fairly good situation, is that this year we may only lose one or two of our nucleus of players,” Brown said. “So if we just bring in a few players, I think we are at a good point because we do not have to replace a whole squad. Hopefully we can get a few names in here to fill in and by the time the stadium becomes a reality, then you are at a point where you can bring in large numbers (of freshmen).”

Senior pitcher Chad Durham said the new stadium will be a tremendous help to recruiting.

“That is the only thing we are missing,” Durham said. “A lot of high school players are immature, and they only care about where they play. Once we get the stadium (it should help).”

Durham said playing night games in front of big crowds is a big deal, too.

Changing to small ball

Brown’s teams have always been characterized by the long ball. Lots of them.

Under Brown’s watch, the Frogs have broken most every major offensive record in program history. The 1996 squad broke school records in runs scored (538), hits (739), RBI (478), doubles (151), total bases (1110), stolen bases (134) and base on balls (382). The 1998 team broke team records with 76 home runs and 33 triples.

But the Frogs have also set a school record in errors (130 in 1996) and posted an ERA over 6.00 four times with Brown as head coach.

The Frogs continued to win, however, because of their offense.

“Our track team is known for its sprinters, and we were known for our bombers,” Brown said. “If you wanted to beat us, you were going to have to score 11 or 12 runs.”

After the NCAA changed regulations for aluminum bats to reduce offense just before the season started last year, the Frogs run production fell dramatically. The pitching did not improve significantly, and the team ranked last in the WAC in pitching with a 5.53 ERA.

They were 6-29 when opponents scored more than five runs, but 15-6 when they held opponents to less than five runs. The team’s fielding was not much better than the pitching, as the Frogs were last in the WAC in that category as well with a .956 fielding percentage.

Overall, the Frogs were outscored by 48 runs for the season.

The Frogs did not get the new bats until a week before the start of the season and were not able to adjust to a different style of play, Brown said.

“When we started, we were hitting balls that we thought were going to go out,” Brown said. “All fall we were hitting a lot of home runs and all of a sudden the ball is not going anywhere. Once we started (working) on bunting and stuff it was too late. We just didn’t have the material to do that kind of offense.

“All of a sudden we were out of our element and not very equipped to change. We did not have the personnel. We had bigger people that were not that fast.”

With college baseball changing, Brown said his team will look for different kinds of athletes to recruit. The team will no longer go after big burly power hitters as in the past.

“You look at a totally different athlete,” Brown said. “The guy who hits a lot of home runs — you just can’t look at that anymore. You have to see if he can play defense, can he do a few other things because he is not going to come in here and hit 25 to 30 home runs. I don’t think anybody is going to do that anymore.”

Athletics Director Eric Hyman said it is important for coaches to be able to change when necessary.

“I think the coach has to be able to adapt to be successful,” Hyman said. “I think anybody in any profession (has to).”

Brown will try to make the change from an offensive-oriented philosophy to one that emphasizes pitching, defense and small ball.

“We worked very, very hard recruiting and working in the fall on pitching and defense to try and get that back up to a point where we need it to be,” Brown said. “We will look a lot more at defense from our position players to make sure they can play and then hope they can hit good enough to get us going.”

With junior Erick Macha starting the season at shortstop, Brown said he thinks the defense will be better.

An improved defense will benefit the pitching staff immensely, Durham said.

“A good defense is a pitchers dream,” Durham said. “People think that good pitchers strike everyone out. Good pitchers get ground balls and let the defense (handle things).”

Tougher schedule ahead

The Frogs were 12-5 in 1999 against teams that eventually left the WAC when it split. The loss of lower division teams gave the Frogs a tougher schedule by forcing them to play more often against programs like Rice and San Jose State, which have combined to appear in the last three College World Series.

The team’s conference record dropped from 18-10 to 12-18.

“We had a good league and I told people that I thought we were going to have one of the top leagues in the country,” Brown said. “There is not one team you can go out and slop around and expect to win.”

The program will also have a tough non-conference schedule, facing schools like Texas, Texas Tech, Baylor and Oklahoma.

The Frogs will play eight teams that reached the NCAA Regionals and two that made it to the College World Series.

“We have maybe five or six games we should win, and other than that we are going to have to play good every time,” Brown said. “It is difficult for us to make a huge won/loss difference in a season because we play so many good teams.”

Hyman said he expects the team to take steps to move forward “to national prominence.”

“That is key,” Hyman said. “We need to move forward.”

Brown has more humble expectations.

“I just want us to get back to the point where we played good baseball and hustled and gave a good effort everyday,” Brown said. “I think this last year was the first year since I have been here that I felt we didn’t really get after it every game. We just didn’t do it as coaches and we didn’t push the right buttons to get what we needed out of the people.”

Brandon Ortiz
b.p.ortiz@student.tcu.edu