The Cardinals hired a new hitting coach, Brant Brown, to replace Turner Ward. Can Brown improve the performance of STL's young hitters who struggle for consistency and don't know how to get out of brutal slumps? What does Brown bring to the job?

1) He's fluent in analytics and the potentially valuable information that can help hitters.

2) He has demonstrated the ability to take a complex subject (data) and simplify it in ways that hitters can understand.

3) Brown, a left-handed hitter, played five seasons of major-league ball and went through the entire experience, good and bad. He had strong power, but too many strikeouts pulled him down.

Wait ... that sounds like Nolan Gorman!

Yes. Exactly.

Brant Brown was Nolan Gorman during his own MLB career. If any coach can relate to -- and fully understand -- the enormity of Gorman's strikeout plague and loss of confidence, it's this new batting coach. And that isn't a negative. It's a positive.

Brown has walked in those cleats. And because of his own career never developed into what it could have been, Brown can learn from his own failure and tap into his own past to help Gorman pivot to a better future.