'Just being simple': Dylan Brewer shares secret behind breakout start to season
Eli Jones couldn’t help but call it for what it is. He was blunt when he said it: Dylan Brewer is “the best hitter in the country.”
While there’s a lot of great players around college baseball right now, Brewer is right in that mix. Starting out as the eight-hole hitter after receiving the Opening Day start in centerfield, he hasn’t looked back and only progressed.
In just 14 games, Brewer has hit .478/.696/.580 with two homers and 14 RBIs. He leads South Carolina with 22 hits in 46 at-bats. Here’s the real crazy statistic: he’s only struck out once.
“The main thing I’m doing is just being simple in whatever I need to do for that at-bat, not trying to get too big,” Brewer told GamecockCentral. “Even these past two midweeks, I got too big. And then I just got back to being simple. So it works out.”
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In that time span, the fifth-year outfielder has gone from bottom of the order to the Gamecocks’ leadoff hitter. And it’s a spot he’s thrived in so far. Most recently, he went 3-for-4 with two homers and four RBIs in a 10-0 win over Longwood on Friday. And that’s without mentioning his defensive efforts.
“Of all our outfielders, he’s probably the most multi-dimensional,” head coach Mark Kingston said. “What I mean by that is he’s our best defender out there, arguably with Evan Stone. He can hit for power, he can steal bases. Of all our guys, Petry’s a power hitter, Kennedy Jones is a power hitter, Blake Jackson’s a table-setter, Stone’s a table-setter type, but Brewer brings all of it to the table.”
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Even Kingston, who has been around baseball for a long time, couldn’t have seen this coming. Not from a player who hit .240 just last season for the Gamecocks. But as Kingston pointed out, Brewer had a good spring and earned himself a starting spot because of what he could do.
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“I don’t know that many centerfielders are playing better than him in the country, both offensively and defensively,” Kingston said. “We knew that he had earned a starting spot this year because he had a pretty decent spring. But to think that he would be playing this well on both sides of the ball, I can’t say I predicted it.
“But it’s great to see because he’s a hard worker, he’s a great teammate, he loves to play, he’s older, he’s been through a lot of games over the years. So it’s just really nice when your older guys that are good program guys get rewarded for doing a lot of the right things.”
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For as well as Brewer has been playing, at some point he’s going to have to cool down, right? He still thinks he hasn’t peaked yet. But at the same time, he knows what it’s like to fail in this game. This has been his coming out season after four years of average play.
“Me personally, I feel like I haven’t played to my full potential in five years up here in college. And I’ve been on the downside for a while, I was on the downside,” Brewer said. “So the biggest thing for me is just knowing that it could go the other way. Can’t get too high, can’t get too low, because I’ve been too low. The reason I got too low because I got too high. So I’m just trying to meet in the middle and stay in that constant mindset. And also just realize there’s eight other guys in the lineup that have my back. It’s a big deal to me. So it’s working.”
