Note: This story originally published on May 30, 2019. You can see coverage from Vanderbilt's 2019 College World Series win here, and can follow the MLB Draft here.

Thirteen-year-old Tyler Brown lifted his mom’s cancer-riddled body from out of the driver’s seat and took the wheel as she mumbled through a stroke in the summer of 2012.

He punched the gas and drove home as fast as he could. No need to worry about a ticket for speeding or underage driving. Brown had seen trouble before and would see far worse ahead.

Brown, now a Vanderbilt baseball standout, was just a few weeks from holding his dying mom’s limp body in their kitchen. It would take another week before his estranged father would learn about her death.

Two years later, he was adopted. Three years later, he blew out his pitching arm in high school. And, in his freshman year at Vanderbilt, his daughter was born with Down syndrome and a life-threatening heart condition.

Now, Brown is a 20-year-old doting father, a man of renewed faith and one of the best relief pitchers in college baseball with an extraordinary story to tell.

“But I can sit here today and tell you that I don’t deserve all the ways that God has blessed me,” said Brown, who will play for Vanderbilt in the NCAA Tournament this weekend.

REACTION: Rock star Bret Michaels pledges $10,000 donation in honor of Tyler Brown's daughter

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Blue-collar kid from Ohio

Brown, a right-handed sophomore, was an All-SEC relief pitcher this season. His 14 saves lead the conference and rank sixth nationally. When Vanderbilt needed to close out a tight game, coach Tim Corbin usually handed the baseball to Brown.

“Because to Tyler, that’s not pressure. That’s just competing,” Corbin said. “Life has thickened his skin. He’s had experiences you and I have not had.”

Brown grew up in a blue-collar family near Savannah, Ohio. His dad was a truck driver and his mom worked in a factory. Brown only knew hard work, hard-nosed sports and hard times.

He was chopping wood as a 9-year-old to fill the family’s wood stove in the winter when his mother stopped short while swinging a maul splitter over her head. A pulled muscle in her chest seemed like a minor injury, but months of persistent pain revealed a tumor.

“Getting off the (school) bus that day and walking inside, everyone was sitting there quiet, like a morgue,” Brown said. “Mom was under a blanket. She didn’t want to look at me because she felt like a disappointment.”

Cindy Brown had multiple myeloma, a cancer that attacks white blood cells and eats through bone marrow. She struggled through tumors, chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant before finally going into remission. But the Brown family never recovered, and an already-strained marriage broke apart.

“My mom had her falling out with my dad," Brown said. "Then me and my dad had our falling out. They divorced in the summer after my fifth-grade year. I felt like I was on my own.”

‘Mom, you’re freaking me out!’

The cancer had returned by the time Cindy Brown slurred her speech and swerved her car down a country road while having a stroke that day. Her son was walking home from a nearby farm, where he had baled hay in the sun to earn money for the family.

“Mom, you’re freaking me out! What’s wrong?” Brown yelled after he flagged down her car.

He drove her home and then sprinted to a nearby paramedic’s house for help. She went to the hospital and recovered. A few weeks later, Brown ran frantically to the neighbor’s house again, but it was too late.

Almost seven years later, while sitting in the Vanderbilt dugout, Brown can describe every detail of his mom’s death on Aug. 3, 2012. He pauses with each breath and illustrates the scene — as if he’s seen it a thousand times in his mind..

“(My half-sister) Jessica is unpacking the groceries. Me and mom are sitting at the table, and mom just falls over,” Brown said. “We start carrying her. She collapses, just dead weight. I panic.

“She’s looking at us. I tell her I love her. She says, 'I love you, too.' Then, I feel her go.”

A relationship too strained for description

Stiffening his back against the dugout wall, Brown struggles to describe the strained relationship with his father. He wants to put it in a mature light. After all, he’s a father now. But pain is pulsating through his face.

“I have reached out to him a couple times in my life to try to mend things, but there’s no healing, I guess,” Brown said. “I found God and I learned to forgive.”

Brown won't offer details about what separated he and his father, but he acknowledges there was trauma he’d rather not replay. He declines to provide his father’s name, and he doesn’t list him on his biography page on the Vanderbilt baseball website.

Brown’s anger boiled over after his mom’s death. He said it took a week before his father heard about her death.

“I was there. I was the man of the house. Where were you? I don’t need you,” said Brown, raising his voice in the dugout, as though still a 13-year-old talking to his estranged father.

Brown lived with his father for a short time until the court granted emergency guardianship to Dan Pritt, the father of Tyler’s half-sisters. Then he lived with his former Little League coach, Greg Ramsey, and son Walker, who was Tyler’s close friend and football teammate. Then he lived with Jimmy and Amie Walker, his mother's friends.

Within two years, Jimmy Walker died in a car crash and Walker Ramsey, a 17-year-old quarterback, died of a seizure.

‘God was present when we met’

Tragedy seemed to pause when Brown was adopted by Brandon and Koren Oswalt.

“Brandon just came into my life,” Brown said. “God was present when we met.”

Brandon Oswalt was a talented former pitcher from the same Ohio area. He came from a broken home, suffered career-ending arm injuries and hit hard financial times as an adult. He found solace in faith, forgiveness and coaching baseball.

“Parts of Tyler’s life is my life on repeat,” Oswalt said.

Oswalt coached Brown on a summer baseball team. After games, they would go fishing, pray together beside the lake and talk about life’s hard lessons. Oswalt taught the 16-year-old to let go of anger from his mom’s death and hate from his dad’s absence.

The Oswalts adopted Brown on Dec. 9, 2014, and moved to nearby Columbus. They quickly discovered the extent of his neglect.

Brown hadn’t been to a dentist in years. He read at a third-grade level and struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia.

Brown caught up academically, thrived athletically and grew into an imposing pitcher with a 95-mph fastball.

‘Worth taking a chance on’

Brown’s dream of playing Major League Baseball started as a 6-year-old sitting on the couch with his mom and watching C.C. Sabathia pitch for the Cleveland Indians.

When Vanderbilt's Corbin, fresh off winning the 2014 national championship, came to recruit Brown, it was his chance to shine. Corbin had already sent several Vanderbilt pitchers to the major leagues, and he was interested in Brown.

“Tyler threw 12 pitches. The first pitch was 94 (mph). The second pitch was 83 (mph), so I thought he had a change-up,” Corbin said. “But his velocity kept going down. Something was wrong.”

“I couldn’t feel my arm. It turned purple," Brown added.

Brown tore the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow in the biggest pitching opportunity of his life. He underwent Tommy John surgery, could not pitch for more than a year and saw most college coaches stop recruiting him.

“But his backstory helped us stay on him,” Corbin said. “If he was tough enough to get through all that, he was worth taking a chance on.”

Coach Corbin, I’m having a baby

Two weeks before enrolling at Vanderbilt, Brown learned his girlfriend, Jocelynn Butcher, was pregnant. He had to call the coach who believed in him to break the news.

“I was sweating bullets,” Brown said. “Telling Corbs was like telling her dad that she’s pregnant.”

Corbin paused when he heard the news, took a deep breath and assured Brown that he wouldn’t abandon him.

“It was the first time for me (to have) a player who’s had a child,” Corbin said. “But we were going to support him to make it work for that child.”

‘She was barely breathing’

Isabella Rose Brown was born March 22, 2018. There was no warning of her dire condition.

“It’s still hard to talk about,” said Butcher, fighting off tears. “She was barely breathing, and they took her immediately.”

Isabella had Down syndrome and Tetralogy of Fallot, a condition that limits oxygen due to holes in the heart.

She had her first heart surgery at 5 months old. Her heart temporarily stopped during the operation, a lymph node was damaged and her lungs filled with fluid.

At 11 months old, she was life-flighted to the hospital with respiratory syncytial virus, pneumonia, bronchiolitis and a collapsed lung. The holes in Isabella’s heart had quadrupled in size, and the surrounding fluid caused so much swelling that her eyes were swollen shut.

In April, Vanderbilt was playing Auburn when Brown flew back to Ohio for Isabella’s second surgery, which was successful. Jocelynn and a healthy Isabella visited Nashville to see Brown pitch a month later.

Brown’s teammates crowded around the backstop fence just to catch a glimpse of the smallest fan with the biggest smile in the ballpark.

New family photo for motivation

Isabella’s parents are uniquely conditioned to care for her.

Butcher will graduate with a nursing degree in December. She already works as a hospice nurse, caring for elderly patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

“I love to sit there and hold their hand, let them know that I’m here,” Butcher said. “I use that same love and patience with Bella.”

Brown’s niece has Turner syndrome, a chromosomal disorder similar to Down syndrome. He helped care for her while his mother was battling cancer. He always had a soft spot for children with disabilities, and he sometimes picked fights with kids who bullied them.

“I am so proud to stand with Bella as my child with Down syndrome," Brown said. "How could I have ever doubted God? Bella has turned into the biggest blessing.”

In the years after his mother's death, Brown carried a photo of his mom to every baseball game. It reminded him of her strength and the dream they shared that he would one day pitch in the major leagues.

He has since put that photo away and replaced it with a picture of his girlfriend and daughter.

“I started this journey of baseball for my mom. It was a promise to her that I would do something special with my life,” Brown said. “But my mom wouldn’t want me to live in the past. Every time I look at Bella, I smile. I’m not in the past anymore.”

Tyler Brown: Five more things to know

Last game for mom: Brown’s most memorable game was the last one he played in front of his mom before she died in 2012. He hit three home runs for his summer team during a game in Findlay, Ohio.

Nasty boys: Brown loves old-school, blue-collar baseball players like Pete Rose, Nolan Ryan and the so-called “Nasty Boys,” the notorious pitching trio of the Cincinnati Reds in the 1990s, led by hard-throwing Rob Dibble.

Flame-throwing 14-year-old: At 14, Brown was allowed to participate in a 17-year-old baseball showcase. The scouts started to leave when Brown took the mound. He threw a 92-mph fastball on his first pitch, and they immediately returned to the bleachers.

Tattoos tell story: Brown has several tattoos, including a tribute to his mom on his chest. On his pitching arm, he has “21,” his daughter’s name “Isabella” and a lion, which symbolizesthat he is the protector of his family.

Why 21?: Brown’s mom is buried in plot No. 21 at an Ohio cemetery. He wears No. 21 for Vanderbilt. Isabella has Down syndrome, which is identified by abnormalities of chromosome 21.

Reach Adam Sparks at asparks@tennessean.com and on Twitter @AdamSparks.