From 10th round to Top 5 Giants prospect, Brown turning heads

Travis Ishikawa watched Vaun Brown day in and day out. The Single-A San Jose hitting coach studied the prospect 15 years his junior for the first half of the 2022 season.

Ishikawa noticed every sprint down the line on a ground ball to short, every attempt to score from first base. In his 20th season in pro ball, fifth as a coach, Ishikawa hadn’t seen anyone play like that in a while. So, one day while picking up balls in the cage, he had to ask Brown a nagging question.

“Why do you play the way you do?” he asked. “There’s not a single play you take off.”

“I've never been the best on my team, and so I've always felt like I've had to outwork everybody to be just as good or to try to be better,” Ishikawa recalled Brown saying. “And the other part was, ‘When it's running from home to first, it takes three seconds. I can give my team three seconds of my hardest effort.’”

At the time, Brown was outside the Giants’ Top 30 Prospects list. He was a 10th-round Draft pick in his first full season at age 23. But with that work ethic, the outfielder has elevated all five of his tools, becoming San Francisco’s No. 5 prospect and a strong contender to get called up to Oracle Park this summer in the process.

As a freshman, Brown didn’t even make his high school’s summer team. That only fueled him, and by the following spring, he was on the squad. The Sarasota native stayed in state for college, hitting .260 with 10 homers and 23 stolen bases through his first three seasons at Florida Southern.

“He always had tools, but he never really took them to the game with him,” said Giants scout Jim Gabella, who had been watching Brown since his freshman year. “And then finally, when he became a senior, that's when all those tools started to come together.”

Brown was hitting .286/.375/.571 through 18 games, but then the rest of the 2020 season was canceled due to the pandemic. He began to wonder if he’d ever step foot on a field again.

As Brown waited to hear whether the NCAA would grant another year of eligibility, he studied for the GRE to be able to get his Masters – something his mother always expected him to get. During that time, Brown waited tables at a local resort and did his best to stay in baseball shape. And when he was finally able to return to the field, Brown had a fresh perspective.

“Just playing every day like it was my last because you really don't know when that can be,” he said. “That's just a mindset that I'm going to continue to have throughout my career.”

With that attitude and “as many tools as anyone in that Draft,” according to Gabella, Brown broke out with a .387/.462/.793 slash line for the Moccasins before the Giants selected him with the No. 296 overall pick that summer. And it was much the same in his pro debut, hitting 354/.480/.620 in 25 games in the Rookie-level Arizona Complex League.

But even with that success, Brown struggled with fastballs up. In 2022 while working in the cage during Spring Training, Giants' special advisor Will Clark noticed Brown’s hands were getting low, which made solid contact on the high heat “basically impossible.”

As Brown adjusted to a new stance and full-season ball, he started off slow, totaling 11 hits through his first 13 games with San Jose. But Ishikawa wasn’t worried, he never saw the right-handed hitter without a plan.

“I really take pride in the mental aspect of the game, and for a lot of people, the more you press, the more it's gonna get worse,” Brown said. “So for me, it's kind of riding the wave, enjoying it and just trusting that if I keep putting that work in, day in and day out, stuff’s just gonna come.”

And that it did. In 23 May games, Brown posted a .448/.538/.885 slash line and went a perfect 13-for-13 on the basepaths. In a jokingly selfish way, Ishikawa texted Giants director of player development Kyle Haines that Brown wasn’t ready for a promotion yet with a smiley face. But it wasn’t long before the jokes turned into “He needs to get out of here.”

“He was just on fire," said Ishikawa. "And I could feel it coming."

As much as Brown has opened eyes with his stats, those who know him can’t help but praise what the box score doesn’t say. Gabella -- who was recently named the Giants' Scout of the Year – said Brown’s makeup is off the charts.

Ishikawa is reminded a lot of his former teammate Hunter Pence, who has won five MLBPAA Heart and Hustle Awards across three teams. Although they only shared a clubhouse for a couple weeks in 2014, Pence led a team meeting the first day that gave Ishikawa goosebumps and the feeling he could run through a wall.

“Vaun has a lot of those same qualities. Obviously, he’s a lot quieter than Hunter, but I think as he hopefully establishes himself at the big league level and maybe becomes more of a veteran presence, I can see him turning into that kind of spokesman for the team and being the leader of the team and doing a lot of the same things that Hunter did for the Giants.”

With San Jose, Brown was pulling the ball about 50 percent of the time. That figure slid to 36 percent with High-A Eugene as he began to hit to all fields, though his approach tends to be right-center.

“I really want to stay through the ball, stay extended because if I think 'pull,' it's just gonna be super-rotational and a lot of foul balls in the third-base dugout,” the right-handed hitter said. “So for me, that kind of just happened on its own. I really wasn't thinking 'drive it to a certain area.' It just happened. That's where the pitcher was throwing, and that's where I was getting hits.”

Utilizing his 55-grade power, Brown clubbed 23 homers, which tied him for third-most in the organization. And although the outfielder was striking out a lot, he was beginning to take more walks. On the rare occasion Brown had back-to-back hitless games, he looked at footage and realized his hands were lowering. He’d just make an adjustment and get back at it.

As the strong campaign forged on, Brown entered the Giants’ Top 30 Prospects list at No. 10 in August. And at season’s end, the Florida native led all full-season Minor Leaguers with a .346 average and a 1.060 OPS. His .623 slugging and .437 on-base percentage was best among all Giants batters. He also topped the system with 44 stolen bases in 50 attempts.

Brown puts a lot of effort into his fitness and nutrition, including building up his calf muscles to make him more of a threat on the basepaths. But it’s about more than the physical attributes that lead to his 70-grade speed. Ishikawa often asked the speedster about his mindset in a certain situation. And every time, Brown had a detailed explanation of his “craft.”

“He's a great blend of both a cerebral and a physically gifted runner,” said Haines. “A lot of times you'll see guys who are gifted runners just try to run with their raw speed. And then the guys who are smarter usually are slower. So he's such a great blend of being able to think about the situation, put a lot of the variables into the situation and then use his speed to take advantage of it.”

And while his bat and legs are certainly flashy enough to draw most of the attention, Brown is still most proud of his arm, which was his best tool as a kid and what eventually got him on the high school baseball team.

The 24-year-old spent time across the outfield last summer, mostly in left as he earned a promotion to Double-A on Aug. 25. But at that point, lingering knee discomfort couldn’t be ignored any longer. After two Richmond at-bats, Brown underwent cleanup surgery.

Brown was frustrated, especially because a lot of family members came to see him in the Eastern League. The procedure also meant he couldn’t play in the Arizona Fall League. But he got back to work rehabbing his knee and found silver linings in the people he worked with at the Giants' complex and even the Arizona weather.

After earning a non-roster invite to big league camp this spring, Brown gained more experience than his five Cactus League at-bats might indicate. He talked about staying healthy with Mitch Haniger, played catch with a weighted ball with Mike Yastrzemski and he talked outfield jumps with Austin Slater.

As Brown enters his third pro season with more hype than he’s ever had, two questions remain: Can he stay healthy? How will his bat handle upper-level pitching?

“It might take a couple years to get used to that upper level of pitching,” Haines said. “We've seen a lot of really talented players need to spend a couple years. But if he does to the upper levels what he did last year to the A-ball levels, I mean, he might force [Giants' GM] Farhan Zaidi and others' hands really, really fast.”

While Brown’s dream is to be up the Majors, he said his priority is staying healthy so he can continue to give his all, three seconds at a time.

“I want to go to sleep at night and be like, 'OK, I did what I could,'” he said. “And who knows, that ground ball in the 6 hole, you might be able to beat it out.”