Report: Mizzou Baseball to hire Drew Dickinson as pitching coach

Dickinson is set to join the Tigers after six seasons at Virginia

Mizzou Baseball is reportedly set to make a splash hire in Drew Dickinson at pitching coach, per Joe Healy of D1baseball.com

Dickinson spent the last six seasons with national power Virginia, leading one of the top pitching staffs in the country and making three appearances in the College World Series under legendary head coach Brian O’Connor.

O’Connor left Charlottesville for the head coaching job at Mississippi State this offseason, and Dickinson was under consideration for the lead job at UVA. The Hoos hired Duke head coach Chris Pollard instead, giving Kerrick Jackson the opportunity to swoop in and grab one of the top assistants in the country.

Dickinson’s hurlers combined for a 4.02 ERA from 2022 to 2024, the best in the ACC and 10th-lowest in the nation. That span included a 3.81 team ERA in 2023, which was the fourth-best in the country.

Virginia took a step back this year, ranking 42nd in Division I with a 4.68 ERA and missing the NCAA regionals for the first time since 2019, but still finished 32-18 with a 16-11 mark in conference play.

Dickinson also served as pitching coach at Illinois from 2012 to 2019, helping the Illini achieve unprecedented success with three NCAA regionals appearances and their first ever super regional in 2015.

Illinois won the Big Ten title and was a top eight national seed that season on the strength of southpaw ace Tyler Jay, who was named a First Team All-American and the Big Ten Pitcher of the Year.

The team set a new program record with a 2.55 ERA in 2015 that also ranked fifth nationally.

Jay was drafted sixth overall in the MLB Draft by the Minnesota Twins that summer, the highest draft pick in Illini history. Cody Sedlock was also selected in the first round of the draft the next season, giving Dickinson first round pitchers and the Big Ten Pitcher of the Year in consecutive seasons.

In total, Dickinson has seen six of his hurlers as a pitching coach reach the major leagues. That number includes two current big leaguers, Mike Vasil of the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds’ Andrew Abbott.

Vasil has a 2.18 ERA in 41.1 innings pitched as a rookie this season and Abbott is putting up all-star numbers in his third major league season with a 1.87 ERA and 2.7 WAR in 11 starts. Abbott’s ERA would lead Major League Baseball if he was a qualified pitcher, falling short due to an early season stint on the injured list.

Dickinson’s records and prior stops point to him being one of the best collegiate pitching coaches in the nation, something the Tigers could desperately use. Mizzou ranked last in the SEC and 284th in the nation this season with a 9.19 ERA.

But the cupboard is not bare for Dickinson, who will have plenty of promising young pitchers to work with between this season’s freshmen and the nine pitchers committed to the program in its incoming freshmen class.

The hire is also a tangible sign of the department’s renewed commitment to the baseball program under Jackson. The Tigers have been working at a heavy disadvantage compared to the rest of the SEC in resources since joining the conference, and bringing on Dickinson is a major step in the right direction.

Whether Mizzou can ever return to its golden era of pitching when the team produced stars like Max Scherzer and Kyle Gibson is still to be seen, as is the future of the Jackson era of Tigers baseball.

But Dickinson’s hire has the potential to have a major impact over the next few seasons as Jackson and the program try to pull off a successful rebuild and reach the NCAA regionals for the first time since 2012.