One pitch at a time

by

Homewood

Homewood High School baseball coach Lee Hall had been keeping tabs on it for some time, without alerting his pitching coach.

It wasn’t a pitch count or any other metric used to evaluate the Patriots’ pitching staff. And even though it involved pitching coach Keith Brown, he had no idea.

Just a few games into the 2026 high school baseball season, Keith Brown coached his 900th game as a member of the Homewood baseball program.

“I was just kind of shocked, to be quite honest with you,” Brown said. “And then just really thankful.”

Thankful is a word Brown reaches for often. It does not seem a performative word when he uses it, not the expected tenor of a man accepting a plaque. It is the genuine response of someone who has spent 29 years pouring into people in one place.

Brown, who teaches English at Homewood High School and serves as the pitching coach, has been a fixture in the Patriots’ dugout since he walked through the doors of the school as a young adult. He has worked under three head coaches. He has watched players grow into men and return to the ballpark with children of their own. He has turned down job offers from some of Alabama’s most decorated coaches.

“When you get to a round number like that,” he said, “it really kind of makes you pause and reflect a little bit. And you don’t usually have time to do that.”

Brown grew up in Houston, Texas, moving frequently as a child. When his parents relocated to Alabama during his senior year of high school, he followed, played a year of baseball at the University of Montevallo, then transferred to Auburn. He arrived at Homewood in the late 1990s as a young coach who had no particular intention of staying forever. He simply never found a reason to leave.

“I decided when I took a job, I really wanted to put roots down somewhere,” he said. “And I was fortunate enough to get my first job here at 23 years old.”

Current Spanish Fort head coach Tommy Walker was there in the beginning. Joining the Homewood staff around the same time as Brown, Walker remembers a young coach who absorbed everything around him.

“He was not afraid to challenge your point but always did it in a way that was respectful, and I knew he was just trying to learn,” Walker said. “It was also evident how much Keith loved Homewood High School and the Homewood community.”

Over his first several years, Brown was tested on that loyalty. Walker has led programs including Samford University, Homewood and Mountain Brook over the years, and he wanted Brown to follow him to Mountain Brook in the early 2000s. A few other coaches made their own professional pitches to Brown in those years.

“After I turned down four or five Hall of Fame guys, it was like, okay, it looks like he’s gonna be a Homewood guy,” Brown said with a laugh.

His reasoning ran deeper than sentiment. At Homewood, Brown had something that a younger coach working under a dominant personality elsewhere might not have had: room to grow, make mistakes and learn from them.

“I was able to grow exponentially in my late 20s and early 30s because I had so much responsibility on my plate at a young age,” he said. “I’d like to think that that helped me a lot, to where I’m a much better coach now because I had all that experience when I was so young.”

Finding his lane

Brown did not arrive at Homewood as a pitching coach. He was a middle infielder growing up, and in his early years on staff he coached hitters and infielders. That changed in November 2001, when Homewood’s pitching coach departed and head coach Doug Gann came to him with an assignment.

“He said, ‘Keith, you’re the detail-oriented guy around here. You’re the baseball nerd,’” Brown recalled. “’You’re going have to do the pitching.’”

Brown spent that offseason learning on the fly, leaning on connections in the Birmingham baseball community to help him build a pitching program from scratch.

At the center of Brown’s philosophy is a conviction that has never wavered: throw strike one. He tracks his pitchers’ strike percentages with the same rigor an English teacher might grade a paper. Many of his techniques and strategies in teaching pitching have evolved over the years, but the insistence on pounding the strike zone has remained consistent.

“Everybody’s in love with velocity, and that’s understandably so,” he said. “But throwing strikes and being able to spin a breaking ball and being able to pitch backwards, that’s what wins games at the high school level.”

Gann, who worked alongside Brown for 18 years, did not mince words about what those years of development have produced.

“I would put him up there as one of the best pitching coaches in the state,” Gann said.

Pete Giangrosso, an assistant coach at Mountain Brook who has competed against Brown’s pitching staffs for two decades, echoed the assessment.

“His pitching staffs are always tough and well prepared,” Giangrosso said. “He is very knowledgeable in his craft and gets the most out of his players.”

Brown is quick to credit the catchers who have made his staffs tick. He points to a common thread across the best teams he has coached. In each case, he said, there was an exceptional catcher behind the plate.

This season, he believes that player is senior Cooper Mullins.

“He’s an extension of me, but he’s also uniquely him,” Brown said. “He does an amazing job with our staff, and our kids just trust him so much.”

That trust, Brown believes, is what makes pitch-calling work at the high school level — the relationship between a catcher and his pitchers, the type that is built in practice, games and all moments in between. Current head coach Lee Hall, who has worked alongside Brown for nine years, said that foundation is evident in how Homewood’s pitchers perform under pressure.

“He is the best I have ever been around calling pitches,” Hall said. “The reason is because the kids trust him when he calls a breaking ball in a 2-0 count, because they have worked so closely together in practice.”

Hall, who has spent 35 years in the game, did not offer that praise lightly. Often a coaching transition leads to staff changes. But when Hall was hired in 2017, his first call was to Brown.

“I will never forget when I accepted the job, I told my wife my first phone call is going to be to Keith Brown,” Hall said. “He is my equal, and he could have done everything we have done together these last nine years if he was the head coach. He is a special man, and I consider him a very special friend.”

Giving back

In recent years, something has shifted for Brown. He still pours himself into his pitching staff each spring. But he has begun pouring himself into something else as well.

Three years ago, Brown approached Homewood’s school administration with an idea. He wanted to establish a mentoring program for the school’s newer coaches — not to impose his methods on them, but to walk alongside them.

“Who is coaching us?” he remembers thinking. “Who is helping us? Who are we bouncing ideas off of?”

Brown has worked closely with coaches like Grace Burgess, a Homewood graduate who is currently the volleyball coach, and Jason Harlow, who leads the girls basketball program. He describes the work as being a sounding board, as someone who can help a coach gain perspective when the pressure of competition makes the big picture hard to see.

“That can be a really lonely journey when you’ve got a lot of arrows being fired at you,” he said. “Just to have somebody there to help you take some of those arrows and decompress with.”

Lee Gann, the head baseball coach at Mountain Brook who has known Brown since he arrived at Homewood, sees the mentoring work as an extension of everything Brown has always been about, on and off the baseball field.

“Being a part of 900 games is truly remarkable,” Gann said. “You think about all the people he’s touched, not only as a coach, but developing people and being a part of so many people’s lives. That’s remarkable.”

Walker, who watched Brown begin his career and has remained a close friend, also sees Brown have the same effect on people regardless of the arena.

“Whether it is teaching English or coaching baseball, Keith believes in the players he has coached and in the kids he has taught,” Walker said. “He pushes them to be their best and does it in a way that builds relationships that will last a lifetime.”

Brown credits many of the coaches he’s worked with at Homewood over the years, particularly longtime basketball coach Tim Shepler, current athletic director Rick Baguley and David Jones, who he considers a “Renaissance man.”

The mentoring program Brown leads at the school may have opened the door to what life beyond baseball looks like. He was intentionally vague when discussing how much longer he will lace up the spikes and guide a pitching staff through the annual grind of a baseball season.

“Time is running short,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed it. We’ve had a great run. But I would say there are other things on the horizon at some point.”

He may not reach 1,000 games coached in a Homewood uniform, but the Patriots have a chance to make a special run in the 2026 playoffs. Brown has a seasoned pitching staff and a standout senior catcher, and he still has the drive to compete on a daily basis.

“If we can stay healthy and we can get hot there going into May, I think we’ve got a chance to do some big things. We’ve got a bunch of great kids, great kids,” Brown said.