One afternoon last August, Brian DeLunas plopped down on a metal bench at the University of Missouri. In front of him was a black net. In front of the net was an indoor pitching mound where senior pitcher Drew Garrett was about to go to work.
The 6-foot-6 right-hander unleashed a fastball that registered 95 mph. DeLunas, the school’s pitching coach, watched, his hands caressing the stubble around his chin. He said nothing. Garrett threw another fastball. DeLunas remained quiet.
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This was one of the first times the coach had seen this player, but he knew Garrett’s backstory. Garrett walked 15 batters in 10 1/3 innings the season before. DeLunas also knew the underlying metrics indicated that Garrett could be one of the best starters in college baseball.
That’s why when Garrett started throwing sliders, DeLunas perked up.
“Move to the third-base side,” DeLunas called out. “And rip it glove side.”
Garrett listened. He moved over and threw his best slider of the session.
“Again,” DeLunas said.
Garrett threw another pitch that sliced through the air.
Afterward, DeLunas fist-bumped Garrett and called him into his office. Garrett, exiting the room, seemed to be standing straighter, his shoulders squared. DeLunas didn’t take credit for any of it, but when he sat back down on the metal bench, he said, “He doesn’t know how good he can be.” DeLunas’ tone carried a feeling of responsibility, as if to say, “And I will make sure he ultimately does.”
On Monday morning, Brian DeLunas passed away at age 46 due to complications from kidney disease. He is survived by his wife, Johannah, their 12-year-old son, Rory, and his 22-year-old stepdaughter, Maren.
“Words cannot describe how heartbroken we are in the loss of our friend,” Missouri coach Steve Bieser said in a statement.
In the last decade, DeLunas held multiple jobs in Major League Baseball. He was the Seattle Mariners’ bullpen coach (2017-18), the Mariners director of pitching development and strategies (2018-20) and the New York Mets’ special projects coordinator (2021). He also coached in the private sector, co-founding Premier Pitching Performance in St. Louis, where he worked with Tanner Houck, Kyle Gibson, Devin Williams, Jake Brentz, David Phelps, Mitch Keller and more.
“It’s cliche to say he cares about people, but you have some coaches who are out there for different reasons,” Gibson, a 2021 All-Star, said last fall. “He’s not one of them. He cares about each guy. I knew I could trust him.”
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DeLunas’ coaching career began with an invitation to go for a car ride.
Mason Horne, then the baseball coach at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park, was heading up from St. Louis to Marissa, Ill., to see a high school player named Jake Odorizzi. Horne didn’t want to go alone, so he called up a buddy who knew baseball.
“Hey, man,” Horne said to DeLunas on the phone, “why don’t you run out to this game with me and take the radar gun?”
The two had met years earlier while in college in the Montclair League, a summer baseball league in Illinois.
“He was a big ol’ guy,” Horne said. “I recall him throwing kind of hard, but I knew he was injured a lot.”
Injuries had been a theme for DeLunas, who grew up in St. Louis and starred as a baseball and football player. As a catcher and then pitcher at Oakville High School, college coaches flocked to meet with him. The principal would call his sister, Christina Cheeley, out of class. She’d then pry Brian from his class and walk him down to meet the coaches and scouts. Their praises helped him envision playing professionally.
His shoulder started to bother him in his junior year. For months, DeLunas took anti-inflammatory medicine to calm it down. Ultimately, his shoulder hurt to the point he couldn’t lift his arm and he had to sit out. “It was devastating for him,” Christina said. “Baseball was his game. I think he thought that was what he was always going to do. It’s hard to see someone’s dreams fly away so fast.”
Despite his shoulder never fully recovering, DeLunas was good enough to earn a college opportunity at Missouri Baptist, where he met Horne. Their friendship developed naturally — two dudes who would talk the game constantly. After college, Horne entered coaching and thought his pal would be a great voice for players. But DeLunas didn’t want anything to do with coaching. Instead, he worked with Dodge Ram pickup trucks in the early 2000s.
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“It was more: ‘You know what? Screw this game. I should have made it, and I’m done with baseball,'” DeLunas told The Seattle Times in 2018.
But the car ride opportunity surfaced in 2004, and Horne thought, “This’ll be my chance to nail him down, see if I can talk him into it.”
DeLunas agreed to go. In time, he agreed to be Horne’s pitching coach. His success at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park led him to leave Horne in 2006 to be a volunteer assistant coach at Missouri, which boasted a senior pitcher named Max Scherzer.
In the summer of 2006, Adam DeLunas, Brian’s brother, got a call from his mother. Brian had dealt with kidney problems due to a pre-existing condition and hadn’t been operating like his usual self, but the family had just learned he was OK.
Adam was overjoyed, but it didn’t last long. Not more than an hour later, his phone buzzed again. It was Brian.
“Hey,” Brian DeLunas said, “Did you talk to Mom?”
“Yeah,” Adam responded. “Great news. You don’t have to have a transplant. That’s great.”
There was a pause.
“Well,” Brian said, “the doctors called back. They read the results wrong. We’re going to need to do a transplant as soon as possible.”
The anti-inflammatories DeLunas had taken to continue playing the game he loved? They hadn’t helped his kidneys. Neither had his blood pressure medication. Or the coaching workload DeLunas had adopted at Missouri that required long hours under the sun in the summer and in the bitter winter cold. He overcame headaches to continue learning from highly respected pitching coach Tony Vitello and players such as Aaron Crow. He suffered vision issues due to his kidney complications, but he never wanted to burden others with his struggles, even if they would have appreciated nothing more than to help him at a moment’s notice.
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Upon hearing his brother needed a kidney transplant, Adam offered his own and turned out to be a match when the entire family was tested. Brian wanted him to be the donor. The night before the transplant, Adam and Brian raced their wheelchairs at the hospital.
“But I remember distinctly, one of the things that hit me the hardest was we were in there before they did the operation,” Adam said, “and you saw a couple of little kids there who needed transplants. That’s when it hit us the most.”
The operation was successful. Brian’s skin, which had yellowed and itched from dialysis, transformed back to the look of his healthier days.
“You started to see the life come back,” Christina Cheeley said last fall. “You started to see the strength, the strong person we were used to seeing.”
The renewed strength allowed him to continue coaching and learning at Missouri as a volunteer assistant. In 2014, he co-founded Premier Pitching Performance, where numerous big leaguers landed for offseason work. His impact on players such as Phelps — who said DeLunas “helped me think about pitching and arm patterns in a completely different way than I ever had” — caught the attention of big-league executives such as Jeff Kingston, who in the mid-2010s was an assistant general manager with the Mariners.
Kingston found DeLunas on Google and called him up. They talked for an hour and a half.
“You know pretty quickly whether coaches have real content or not,” Kingston said. “The ease of conversation and richness of content blew me away.”
DeLunas knew advanced technologies. He understood that pitching development is a holistic pursuit, involving strength, range of motion and more. And he could communicate. So Kingston offered to fly DeLunas to Seattle for an interview. Months later, his family was in Kansas City, sitting behind the Mariners’ bullpen, watching the onetime boy with big-league dreams help others achieve their own.
The inspirational nature of DeLunas’ story attracted attention. In July 2018, Root Sports’ Jen Mueller sat down with Brian and Adam to talk about the road Brian had traveled. Around that time, Brian knew his kidney had fallen below 20 percent functioning again. He needed another transplant.
The reality of kidney disease is that, as Christina Cheeley explained, “the disease never goes away. You get a new kidney and still have the disease. As soon as the new kidney goes in, it’s already attacking the new kidney.”
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Each year, as DeLunas climbed the ranks of baseball coaching, motivated to help others do what he could not, family members essentially held their breath. They knew DeLunas was spending hours a week on dialysis. He withstood the toll to stay around the game.
DeLunas did not talk much about his turmoil. But in the winter of 2018, he spoke with The Athletic’s Jayson Jenks about being present for his wife and son and the reality of his circumstance: “For me, it’s life and death.”
As with the first transplant, DeLunas’ relatives sprang into action, hoping to find they were a match. Even Christina’s son, Austin Cheeley, who at the time was pitching in college at Middle Tennessee, tested to see if he could be a donor. This time, though, DeLunas’ blood rejected theirs. The family begged DeLunas to use his forum as a professional baseball coach to see if anyone was a match. He often chose not to, not wanting to burden others.
In 2019, his deteriorating health made travel tougher, so the Mariners transitioned him from bullpen coach to director of pitching development. Then, in 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Mets poached him to help with pitching development strategies.
Austin Cheeley’s earliest memories of his uncle’s impact in baseball are of when DeLunas was a volunteer assistant at Missouri. When Austin was 10, he thought his uncle’s job was super cool. What he did not realize, he said recently, was that DeLunas was essentially working the job unpaid.
That’s how bad his uncle wanted to coach once he chose to return to the game.
That memory gave him chills last spring when he heard his uncle was in town to interview for the official Missouri pitching coach job. Austin had always marveled at stories about DeLunas’ work with Mets pitchers like Noah Syndergaard, but he was excited that his uncle would be closer to home, allowing them to spend more time together.
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Even before DeLunas accepted the Missouri opportunity — about which DeLunas said, “In the back of my mind, I’ve always wanted to go back and be the pitching coach at Mizzou” — Austin decided to transfer from Middle Tennessee. Missouri, which was close to home, proved to be an option, so he decided to play his last year of college baseball with his uncle.
The two sat together during side sessions such as the one involving Drew Garrett. Throughout the fall, DeLunas collaborated with his nephew. They altered the spin direction on his fastball. They enhanced the bite on his slider. Working together, Austin said this winter, “was honestly one of the most exciting points in my life.”
During the fall, though, Austin could see his uncle was struggling. He’d lost weight. He moved slower.
“He wanted to be the best coach possible,” Austin said. “And at times, I think he put a lot of pressure on himself, which can hurt. And you could see it take a toll.”
Before Christmas break, DeLunas drove to St. Louis for a check-up. Doctors informed him later that day that he needed to return to the hospital. His parents asked him why he thought he was being called back in.
“I think I’m dying,” he responded.
When Austin heard how bleak the situation was — DeLunas was having a hard time eating — he took action.
He drove to Walgreens, bought a notebook, placed it inside the Missouri facility and invited his teammates and coaches to sign it. When he returned the next day to pick it up, the notebook was full of messages, uplifting notes, prayers and appreciations. The next week, Austin drove home and dropped it off at the hospital.
DeLunas wasn’t there when Austin arrived, but Austin put the notebook on the bed. A few days later when Christina stopped by the hospital, DeLunas told his sister: “That notebook, I needed that more than anything.”
Never one to show emotion, the tone of his voice told Christina more than she could ever know about how grateful he was that he could help others, in a way that his dreams couldn’t even capture.
(Photo courtesy of the DeLunas family)
