New approach to pitching helps Vaughan move up through college baseball
Dec. 1—How did Georgia Tech's Jackson Vaughan go from struggling at Pacific in 2021 — not to mention missing the cut at UC Santa Barbara two years earlier — to vying for playing time at a perennial ACC and NCAA Regional contender?
To hear him tell it, it was mostly in his head.
That 2021 season, fresh off a brief but successful bounce-back stint at San Joaquin Delta College, Vaughan said he was trying to be the hero every at-bat, "trying to strike out everyone," but it backfired as his ERA climbed north of 6.00 by the end of the year.
Then Vaughan got a sports psychologist and began to embrace what he called the "process-over-outcome mentality."
"You can't control if you throw a ball or a strike, you give up a hit, you strike someone out," Vaughan said. " ... What you can control is your process to approach your pitch and kind of your routine."
The changes were evident for Vaughan — and not just in the sense that, because he was trying to take it one outing at a time, he started getting annoyed whenever people would tell him his stats. But those stats really were exceptional. Between Feb. 27 and March 25, Vaughan allowed zero earned runs in 10 innings pitched. He carried a sub-2.00 ERA through the end of April before some more awkward outings late in the season, but still finished with the best ERA on the Tigers' squad.
He also became more independent, more himself.
"You could say that I was worrying about what people thought of me a lot," Vaughan said. "And as I started to grow more I just started doing what was normal for me, in the sense of making weird jokes, being weird in the dugout to try to get my teammates pumped up."
The mental game has always been at the forefront of Vaughan's struggles as a pitcher, which is saying something given the physical challenges he's experienced. And that's not just being dramatically undersized for a pitcher, at a charitable 5-foot-8, 185 pounds. No discussion of Vaughan's background would be complete without a mention of the exceedingly rare liver cancer that he survived as a young child. A failed attempt at a transplant caused Vaughan's heart to stop for 36 minutes, but the 3-year-old emerged without brain damage and received a successful second transplant. At Pacific, he became the first NCAA athlete to compete with a liver transplant.
"Some guys just get up and dust themselves off and go back to work, and other guys sulk and complain about all the hardships that have been handed their way," said Bobby Maitia, a local baseball coach who worked with Vaughan through high school. "And I've never even heard him say anything of that nature."
His work ethic was unimpeachable and he had little trouble developing his pitching mechanics over the years. Instead, for Maitia, the biggest thing Vaughan needed to work on growing up was focusing his competitive energy.
"He had to channel his fire," Maitia said. "Sometimes his fire would spread too fast, and he had to learn to kind of take a step back and mellow it out a bit."
After a standout career at Bakersfield High, Vaughan was cut just two days before the start of his freshman year at UCSB.
"Just going back to that place is really tough," he said. "I was in an amazing city but to me it felt like a jail cell."
Scrambling for answers, he turned to Delta College, where he knew the pitching coach Joey Skracic, a Stockdale alum himself. Vaughan didn't even know if he could make a team at the community college level, but the longtime head coach Reed Peters saw him elevate his game, particularly his command, in short order, even during the COVID-shortened 2020 season.
"We work really hard on that with all of our athletes, just in terms of building confidence," Peters said. "Approaching the mental game, that's a class that we have with all of our guys."
When Vaughan arrived at Pacific, he knew he would graduate and still have two years left to play, due to his abortive stint at UCSB and an extra year of COVID eligibility. He made sure the head coach knew he planned to transfer again after graduating.
As Vaughan began to excel during the 2022 season, one intriguing option emerged. Dan Jaffe, Pacific's pitching coach at the time, had worked at Georgia Tech. A couple weeks into the year at UC Davis, Jaffe told Vaughan that Yellow Jackets pitching coach Danny Borrell had been watching him.
"I remember that outing I walked two people and got pulled," Vaughan said. "I just got excited and it took me out of the moment like I was saying."
Vaughan was intrigued by the potential continuity of playing at a higher level with a coach similar to Jaffe, and believed Tech would be a "great chance for me to showcase if I'm really worth it" with two years left to play.
"Normally I would have been done with baseball," Vaughan said. "I'd probably keep trying, but I'd probably be done in a sense last year and that'd be my last year of competitive college athletics. But because of COVID, because of all the things that have happened, it has allowed me to keep going. It's huge."
This time, Vaughan has tried to preempt mental obstacles by establishing a rigorous morning routine: writing five to 10 things he's grateful for, affirmations, an "ego reel" of his best moments, prayer and breathing exercises.
The goal is to carve out a role on the Yellow Jackets' crowded, talented pitching staff.
"I think he could be an impact guy for them," Peters said. "I think now, being an older guy, he's going to have a lot of experience on his side, and that goes a long way, especially as a pitcher, just having experience and being able to control the mental part of the game and not get frustrated."
The goal is to keep building his skills with an eye toward playing professionally after his time at Tech.
"You don't measure success by your wins," Vaughan said. "You measure your success by your ability to go through failure without any loss of enthusiasm."
Reporter Henry Greenstein can be reached at 661-395-7374. Follow him on Twitter: @HenryGreenstein.
