Patience. Focus. Consistency. Three key skills you can attribute to both baseball and hunting. Finding your breath at the right moment, keeping the nerves low and letting it fly, whether “it” may be a bullet or a pitch.
Though, for Nate Malak, his fastball might as well be a bullet.
His brother and teammate, Owen, believes Nate’s affinity for outdoor hobbies that require focus and patience can play a role in his ability to stay level-headed on the mound.
“I definitely think it helps with mental part of baseball being able to slow down,” Owen said. ”He’s very patient; he sits in the woods all day. He’ll sit by a river, and might catch nothing all day, but he’s still having fun. He’s definitely very patient and that can definitely help with baseball.”
“He’s just an all-American kid all the way around,” Slippery Rock baseball head coach Jeff Messer said. “He’s just a really good kid: easy, very, very coachable, very good teammate. I don’t think he gets too high, too low. You know, he kind of slows the game down.”
That patience is a point of emphasis for the 6’3” righty.
“I think the biggest thing for me is patience. On the mound, you don’t always get what you want,” Nate said. “Just little stuff you can’t necessarily control, but you’ve just got to be patient and keep doing what you know how to do and it’ll work out in the end.”
While he does not necessarily have pre- or postgame rituals, Nate does make a clear point to keep his mindset the same regardless of surroundings.
“I say I’m not superstitious, but after something goes down, I think back and I’m like, ‘yeah, maybe I should have done this, maybe I should have done that,’” Nate said. “One thing I think about is, I guess you could call it karma. If I have a rough game or something goes bad, if I lose my temper or like flare up, I just think that’s always going to come back and bite me in the butt next game.”
This level-headed and easygoing manner shows up when considering his coachability.
“You wish you had 16 pitchers like him,” Messer said. “He just, he comes, gets his work, he doesn’t complain, he works hard. I think he enjoys the stream and the woods as much as he does baseball, which is good because I do too, so we have a lot in common. We have a lot to talk about. I wish we had him forever. He’s that type of pitcher.”
Before The Rock
Nate toed the rubber for Seneca Valley High School, where his standout senior season saw him named to 2022 Class 6A Section 1’s first team.
It did not take long for him to get game action after he first donned White and Green. His career started with two scoreless relief innings before making the weekend rotation by the end of his true freshman season in Spring 2023.
Year two saw another jump in contribution. The righty tossed 36.2 innings for The Rock, having worked into the starting rotation. His ERA (earned run average) sat at a sparkling 2.21, while striking out 35 and holding opponents to a batting average under the Mendoza line as a sophomore.
Nate became a full-fledged workhorse by year three as he threw 65 innings over 12 games started. Along the way, he amassed 59 strikeouts, five complete games, two PSAC West Pitcher of the Week honors and a spot on the All-PSAC West second team.
Although not his best start statistically, considering who threw three complete game shutouts during his junior year, Nate’s most impressive start may have been his PSAC tournament start against Millersville University, where he held the nationally-ranked Marauders to two earned runs over 4.1 innings.
“Nate’s coming out party probably was the Millersville game last year in the state tournament. We got beat, but he pitched extremely well against one of the top teams in the country,” Messer said. “His fastball was electric.”
It was his stuff, build, mechanics and that patience, focus and consistency that garnered attention of professional scouts.
“[His throwing motion] is pretty free and easy, and that’s why the scouts liked him. He had the size, he was free and easy, his arm was loose. He threw downhill, did all the right things,” Messer said.
Maintaining that calm-but-dominant presence on the mound allows Nate to pitch his best, and though his competitive energy may occasionally be hidden, it is certainly there.
“I don’t think if I get in a situation or a jam. Normally where you think, nerves start going; I just don’t even think about it. You just keep going. There are just no thoughts, it’s just second nature,” Nate said. “In a sense, you could definitely say where there’s that one pitch in that specific part of the game where it matters the most and the pressure’s on, you have to make that precision shot, hit a corner, do whatever it is.”
That outward facing calmness and automatic thought process allows the senior to consistently repeat his mentality and approach on the mound.
“I’m very competitive and I like to attack any hitter, especially as a pitcher. I go at every single hitter I face. If you look at my strike percentage,” Nate said, “I throw a lot of strikes. I’m just going right at guys and I want them to swing.”
Nate recalls a similarly impressive performance to the Millersville game as another time he reached that flow state. He took the mound against Seton Hill University in a very important late-season matchup and shoved.
“It was a very important game for us to win,” Nate said. “To come out and throw, I think it was one-hitter or two-hitter and shut them out was just beyond what I could have expected for that game.”
It was a complete game, two-hit, zero walk shutout, further priming the electric righty for a senior season to cap off one of the most impressive seasons for an SRU starting pitcher, at least in recent memory.
Heading into his senior year, Nate had three years of steady improvement under his belt, and opened the year by earning a spot on the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association (NCBWA) preseason All-Atlantic Region team.
“[The beginning of this year] was the greatest my arm had been feeling like, ever, at least after a game. I was throwing the day after, and I would have no arm pain.
Primed for a shot at some of The Rock’s single-season pitching records considering his already impressive resume, Nate starting facing long-term adversity for the first time in his Slippery Rock baseball career.
After opening the season with solid starts against Kutztown University and Shippensburg University, a few things started to feel off.
“You could tell something was off, you know. With Seton Hill, that was off a little bit, and they’re a good team. It’s not that they’re not a good team, but, you know, Nate wasn’t himself,” Messer said. “After coming in the second inning, and it probably was hurting the first inning, but the second inning, he said his elbow was hurting, and that’s when we basically say, let’s shut it down.”
Nate ran into some trouble in his next few outings before eventually being removed from that late March game against Seton Hill University with discomfort in his throwing arm.
“He was the number one guy going into the season, so he had high expectations. We had high expectations. You know, injuries as a pitcher, you’re one pitch away from something happening,” Messer said.
There is still information to be gathered as Nate and the team wait on further results, but the early returns do not look good for his ability to pitch this year.
“We don’t know the full diagnosis with his arm, but it’s not good. He won’t be throwing and we get we’ll have to make a decision on where we go and what we do once the doctor decides on that,” Messer said.
“[Nate] will have to make a decision about whether he can get a medical red shirt, and if he can, would he want to come back? Because there’s a lot of hard work, and there’s no guarantee, when you come back, that you’re going to be ready for next year,” Messer said.
A quiet leader
While his injury is still being assessed, Nate now faces a different kind of challenge: staying in the dugout instead of getting to carry the weight of the game from the mound. Given his history and mindset though, there is little doubt in his ability to persevere.
“With his personality and his even keel where it’s not too high, not too low, I think it can sometimes help him fight through adversity,” Messer said
While Nate will be cheering on the White and Green from the dugout, his personal career focus shifts toward potentially redshirting, if he is able, in hopes to help The Rock next year while raising his chances of continuing to pitch after his time at SRU is over.
“He was all in for this year, you know, to try to have the best year he could and get some recognition,” Messer said. “There was a few scouts looking at him, a couple very interested, and now this is going to set it back. But as a pitcher, your timetable is a little bit different than a position player.”
There are plenty of caveats, but with more time to work on his craft, Nate may be able to use this time to come out even stronger on the other side.
“Some guys come back bigger, faster, stronger. I mean, they come back even better,” Messer said.
“It was one of those things where it was just kind of a right hook out of nowhere, but I’m taking it as, there’s different opportunities out there for me. It’s given me an opportunity to sit back and see what’s going on,” Nate said.
While the path with through senior year with no injury was the ideal plan, Nate now plans to do his best and treat this time as an opportunity for improvement.
“I’ve looked into redshirting and coming back next year, so that’s giving me a lot of time to work on, not necessarily pitching, but working on my strength and putting on a lot of weight. My mobility, my mechanics, just the little nitty-gritty of baseball that could push me and make me that much better,” Nate said.
Owen sees the mindset Nate is adapting and believes it can work to help him come back stronger.
“I think he’s looking at it pretty positively. He could look at it as [ruining] his senior year of baseball, or he can look at it as [getting] another opportunity to come back here and be a part of his organization for one more year.,” Owen said.
One thing that will help Nate through the arduous process of recovery from a throwing arm injury is the presence of his brother, who is now a sophomore pitcher for The Rock.
“It’s pretty cool. I was also talking to, I forget who it was, the other day when [Owen] was pitching. I said, ‘this is what it must feel like to be a parent.’” Nate said.
Owen can, in turn, help Nate out with some of the intricacies of navigating injury, as the sophomore went through a similar injury in high school.
“Owen can give him a little perspective because he’s coming off his arm surgery when he was a junior in high school and lost his senior year pitching. It’s a little different from high school to college, but still had to go through the same process, if that’s what the doctors decide it is,” Messer said.
And when he does get back to pitching, Nate knows he and his brother will be a great resource for each other to improve.
“When it comes to practices and things like that,” Nate said. “when it’s down to the nitty-gritty of just looking at film of each other, it’s always me and him just picking apart different things of each other’s mechanics.”
“We’ve grown up playing baseball our whole lives together, so we know how each other works and what our strong points are,” Owen said. “It’s just having a built-in best friend. You’re able to go to the field, have a throwing partner, and we’re able to work together and take videos of each other and dissect how our mechanics are and work together.”
Nate tries to expand his positive influence toward the rest of the team, particularly the young pitchers. He may not be the loudest or the center of attention when inspiring the team, but that does not mean he cannot lead and inspire his teammates.
“He’s always supporting our guys, cheering from the bench, even on days he’s not pitching. He’s always in it, invested in the game, helping out our teammates, different things he sees, always trying to get a better edge for our team,” Owen said.
“I mean, Nate doesn’t say a whole bunch. He’s more a quiet leader. So is Gage [Gillott],” Messer said. “They’ll speak up when they need to speak up…The [underclassmen], they see his work ethic, his success, and they follow that.”
His impact on the team comes right back around to benefit Nate as well. The precedent he and other team leaders have been able to set has maintained a strong culture for SRU baseball.
“The team chemistry is something I’ve never had before,” Nate said. “I don’t know what it is. I feel like this year, maybe it’s because I’m a senior, but I just feel like the connection between all the classes of guys on the team, you couldn’t tell the difference of who’s older, who’s younger, or any of that.”
Of course, even with the importance of baseball to Nate, he still needs to maintain his hobbies through the recovery process. It may be difficult, just as it will be to continue working through baseball activities, but Messer is confident he will find a way.
Regarding Nate’s ability to keep hunting, fishing and getting outdoors even with the potential of an arm brace after surgery, Messer said, “He’ll figure out some way to do it, even if it’s left-handed or something.”
While injuries always throw a wrench into the works, and few things can be certain, Nate’s mind seems pretty set regarding his future.
“If [redshirting] is available, then, I mean, I’m all in,” Nate said. “I’m going for it.”
