Junior outfielder Devonte Brown is a staple on the No. 13 NC State baseball team. The star athlete broke out in the 2020 season and is looking to carry that authority throughout the course of this year’s spring season.
“The only thing I can do is just be aggressive in the box,” Brown said. “I can’t really try to change anything because the more changes you try to make during the season or right before the season, things probably won’t go your way right away. So, I think I’ll just try to keep hitting the ball like I was this past season, try to be aggressive in the box, look for fast balls and try to hit them hard.”
Brown originally joined the team as the No. 5 high school shortstop prospect out of Georgia and helped lead his high school’s team to a 22-8 record and regional title. A hard worker in every sense of the term, the 5-foot-11, 208-pound shortstop was a multi-sport athlete in high school, and used his frame to play as a bruising running back for his high school’s football team.
In his first two seasons with the Wolfpack, Brown turned in 13 combined runs and appeared in 62 total games, with 19 of those being starts. Brown’s best series as an underclassman came against Seton Hall as a freshman, where he earned his first career triple.
However, it was as a junior that Brown really began to emerge. In 17 games during the abbreviated season, Brown started in every game and posted the team’s third-best batting average at .338, and the best slugging percentage on the team of players that appeared in 10 or more games, with a .692.
What made Brown a fan favorite, however, was his ability to soar absolute rockets out of the park, picking up five home runs in just 17 games, to go along with 19 RBIs, 22 hits and 19 runs in 65 at-bats.
Aside from the eye-catching hits, Brown is a versatile player that does a lot of things for the Pack that are understated. The fact that he can switch between the outfield and third base, along with shortstop experience, makes him especially valuable to the team’s success.
Brown’s best game to date came against James Madison in mid-February of 2020, a game in which Brown finished with career highs in hits, RBIs and total bases. The dual infielder/outfielder finished that game with two doubles and ultimately finished the season tied for first on the team in multi-hit games, with seven, and led the team in multi-RBI games, with six.
This all ultimately culminated in Brown earning the Collegiate Baseball National Player of the Week on Feb. 24, 2020.
While Brown broke out in every way possible last season, Brown still sees room for growth on a team that’s hungry for more following disappointing ends to the last several seasons.
“Definitely, I think so,” Brown said on if there is added motivation this year from having play abruptly ended last season due to COVID-19. “I feel like we were off to a great start [last season]. We all had the same idea of thinking we were gonna go to Omaha. So, the way the season ended this past season, I think we’re going to try to just carry that on to this year and hopefully have that same idea and carry that to Omaha and try and win a World Series.”
So far through three games this year, Brown has a .333 batting average in 12 at-bats, along with one run, four hits, two RBIs and five putouts in the field.
“I think you have to enter the season with confidence,” Brown said. “I mean it was kind of sad, a lot of people were down, the way the season ended. But we’re back now, we have some new guys, we didn’t lose too many guys. But I think the season will be really fun for us.”
With a tough series against Georgia Tech slated for this Friday, Feb. 26, Brown isn’t treating the opportunity any differently than earlier in the season.
“To me, I think they’re all the same,” Brown said. “You can’t treat any at-bat differently. If you try to value one at-bat over another, it’s not really going to get you anywhere…we just have to treat all these games the same.”
