Simon Mathews (C’17) doesn’t remember the first time he played baseball. He only knows that at 2 years old, he was swinging around a rubber baseball bat outside of his family’s apartment in St. Louis.
As a 7-year-old, Mathews was obsessed with his baseball uniform and won back-to-back championships with his Little League Pirates.
When he got older, he realized he couldn’t hit baseballs as well as others. But he did have a natural gift for pitching.
“I love pitching. In a lot of ways, the pitcher chooses pitching, and pitching chooses him too,” Mathews said. “Pitching is such a singular thing in all of sport where it’s not the whole game, but it is this real one-on-one match-up with the hitter that defines the action.”
His love for baseball and fastball skills took him to Georgetown in 2015, followed by a brief playing career with Minor League Baseball. When his playing career ended, Mathews discovered coaching.
He coached the Cincinnati Reds for five years and, in 2025, joined the Washington Nationals as its pitching coach, a full-circle moment for him to return to the city where he developed as a baseball player.
“This past year, I was a coach at Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. My grandparents are from the Cincinnati area, and I got to go to work every day at Great American Ball Park,” he said. “I went to Georgetown, and now I get to work every day at Nats Park. It’s an unbelievable privilege.”
Pitching at Georgetown
In high school, Mathews was lightly recruited by collegiate baseball programs and signed to play at Temple University. After the university discontinued its baseball program after his first year, Mathews looked for a new home to be a student-athlete.
Mathews was drawn to Georgetown’s city location and relished the challenge of rigorous academics in its political economy program while competing at a high level on the pitcher’s mound.
On the baseball team, Mathews contributed right away upon arriving for the 2015 season. In his junior year, he was named to the All-Big East First Team. As a senior, Mathews started 14 games for the Hoyas and set a single-season program record with 85 strikeouts.
Mathews said one of the highlights of his student-athlete career was playing under Pete Wilk, who was the head coach at Georgetown for over 20 years.
He credits Wilk with helping him land on his feet and play baseball again after his time at Temple, where he hadn’t had a successful first year on the baseball diamond.
“Pete’s this mountain of a man with this low, gravelly voice. He would go over everything that had gone well and poorly during practice,” Mathews said. “No matter how great everything went, he always sounded pissed off. I miss those times, and I miss him. He was such a fabulous baseball man.”
In 2024, Wilk passed away after a battle with cancer. Mathews said he most admired Wilk’s authentic leadership and dedication to baseball. His memories of Wilk have also motivated him to be a better coach, and he hopes his coaching style honors Wilk’s legacy.
“There’s something that really resonates with me about extremely authentic leadership. Pete was never going to be anybody other than Pete,” Mathews said.
Coaching in the Pros
Mathews signed on with the Los Angeles Angels and played with the team’s Minor League affiliates for nearly three years after graduating from Georgetown in 2017.
When he realized his playing days were over, he joined the Cincinnati Reds’ coaching staff and moved to Boca Chica, Dominican Republic, where he helped train international players for the Major Leagues in the Reds’ baseball academy.
“The best job in baseball is in the big leagues, but the second-best job might be in the DR. It’s just an absolutely beautiful experience of the game,” he said. “Kids that just love [baseball], cheering for each other, having an absolute blast and chasing their dreams.”
After a year in Latin America, Mathews moved to Cincinnati, coaching injured pitchers through their rehab regimen. In January 2025, Mathews was promoted to the assistant pitching coach of the Reds before joining the Nationals coaching staff this past November.
Working With the Nationals
As a coach, Mathews is interested in using analytics to maximize the performance of his team’s pitchers. He’s particularly passionate about using data from sensors that track the velocities, angles and other metrics of baseballs in the field to improve his players’ pitching techniques.
“I took econometrics. It didn’t go great, but I passed that class, so there’s a statistical fluency there,” he said. “My background as a player, I felt like I could weaponize that information to help guys perform. That’s all I ever wanted to do, to make sure guys have the best information possible about what they do well and what they can do better so they can perform at the Major League level because it can be transformational for people’s lives to do that.”
With the Nationals, Mathews leads the team’s pitchers and develops training plans for players. He also produces scouting reports on other teams to help inform game plans and identifies tendencies in his own players to improve their ball game.
“If I’m going to roll somebody out there to make eye contact with Juan Soto or whoever it is and say, Hey, let’s dance. I want to make sure they’re ready because that man’s a good baseball player,” Mathews said.
From swinging a rubber baseball bat to coaching pro baseball players, Mathews said his career as a coach in the Major League means everything to him.
“I love it so much. I’m so privileged and grateful,” he said. “We just want to win and win sustainability. We can win a lot, and there’s no ego involved. It’s going to be so much fun.”
