Written by Josh Moore for 10thRegion.com.

April 16, 2025, will be long remembered for a long time by baseball fans in Falmouth.

That was the night Pendleton County’s varsity team defeated Bracken County, 10-0, and for the first time in program history took the field underneath their own lights at home. It’s a small thing, but the small things matter when they’ve been so long in the making.

Nate Jones knows that. Now in his second season as the Wildcats’ head coach, Jones didn’t have the luxury of home-field lamps when he was a star pitcher for Pendleton County. Yet he managed to launch one of the most unlikely prep-to-pro stories in the history of Kentucky athletics.

He was scouted in high school but went undrafted before playing on scholarship at nearby Northern Kentucky University, then a Division II school that played in one of the few remaining wooden-bat leagues at the time. Jones threw a handful of innings his freshman season and about 20 as a sophomore, but his coaches had high expectations for him as a junior.

“They sat me down and said, ‘Nate, you’re going to be our X factor this year,’” Jones said in a phone interview. “‘If we’re going to be good, it’s because you’re good.’ That clicked for me. When somebody’s dependent on me, I don’t take those types of responsibilities lightly.”

Jones became an even bigger gym rat and powered NKU to a winning record before getting drafted in the fifth round of the 2007 MLB Draft by the Chicago White Sox. He spent most of the next four years in Chicago’s farm system before relieving Will Ohman and striking out former American League MVP Josh Hamilton in his major league debut on April 8, 2012. 

He went on to play in the majors through the 2021 season, earning a World Series ring in his final campaign by virtue of having played for that year’s champion, the Atlanta Braves, early in the season. They traded him in May to the Dodgers, who released him by mid-June.

Jones, a career relief pitcher, recorded 329 innings pitched over the course of 10 seasons and won a gold medal with Team USA in the 2017 World Baseball Classic. He finished his MLB tenure with nine saves, a 22-16 record, 355 strikeouts and a 3.45 ERA. 

But the guy who once could throw a 102-MPH fastball knew it was time to hang up his glove.

“I was kind of at peace with it when the Dodgers let me go because I have a wonderful wife and four kids who were starting to understand me being gone, and I thought, ‘I need to be home for them,’” Jones said. “And the game tries to tell you. If you pay attention, the game tells you when it’s your time to go. I wasn’t no spring chicken anymore. I was giving up more hits than I wasn’t.”

The game might tell you when to go, but it’ll also whisper, “Come back.”

After a few years away from organized baseball, Jones accepted the head coaching job at his alma mater ahead of the 2024 season. His wife Lacy’s blessing was essential but maybe inevitable; she might love Pendleton County’s baseball program even more than Nate. She was a scorebook keeper for the program while in high school and remained friendly with its star pitcher throughout their prep years despite him dumping her in middle school. (Her brother Lincoln was Nate’s catcher on the team.)

Lacy went to pharmacy school at the University of Kentucky but the two reconnected – and rekindled their romance – during the summer following their freshman year. The Jones family – it grew to include daughters Lily, Emmy and Oakley, and son Archer – kept Pendleton County as their permanent residence for the entirety of his major-league career, and it was a no-brainer that he’d retire at the “home base” that Lacy covered with aplomb. 

“She definitely picked up the slack there and helped us be together, travel together and stay together,” Nate said. “I just didn’t want to leave again and be busy during the baseball season again. We talked about it and Lacy and I were like, ‘We think we can make an impact. We think we can make it better.’ We just want to help out wherever we can: this is our home, so why wouldn’t you want to try and make it the best if you had the opportunity?”

Big dreams

Pendleton County won three games in Jones’ first season. The win over Bracken County on April 16 was its fourth this year, so by at least one measure it’s clear that progress is being made on the now well-lit field. The Wildcats are up to seven wins on the year following a series sweep at Robertson County, putting them in solid position for the No. 2 seed in the 38th District tournament.

Jones, who’s set to be inducted as part of the 10th Region Baseball Hall of Fame’s inaugural class this summer, was a member of the last Wildcats team to win a district title (2002, his sophomore season). The program has finished with a winning record just twice (2011, 2012) in the last 16 years and has just one district-tournament win in the same span (2015). 

One need not look too far to see what it takes to field not just a winning team, but one with state-title expectations. Just 21 miles south of Falmouth in Cynthiana, Harrison County High School erected a juggernaut program that’s won four state titles, 22 region titles and 40 district titles under longtime head coach Mac Whitaker. The Thorobreds also currently reside in the same district as Pendleton County.

For the Wildcats to even think about approaching what their rivals have achieved will require years of continued investment – at the high school but as much if not more in the younger ranks.

“Sometimes it’s not easy when we’re still having to teach the fundamentals of the game at the high school level,” Jones said. “ … It starts with a youth program that’s really connected and willing to work together with the high school about what we’re teaching, what we’re trying to get across to these kids and the different levels they should be learning certain things. It definitely starts young.”

That’s starting to happen. Youth teams from the area in the last couple years have started to compete in Northern Kentucky Baseball, a youth league founded in 2012. As long as that continues, 6U and 8U players today could within the next decade have the seasoning to lead Pendleton County to heights not seen since its head coach was on the mound. 

Jones’ players this year have gotten more comfortable asking him about his career, one that seemed far-fetched until it wasn’t. Now he hopes his own emergence from obscurity to the most famous fields in baseball can help encourage kids whose shoes he once wore.

“Life’s not easy,” Jones said. “It’s going to be hard, you’re going to take your lumps. It’s all about your attitude and effort. If you don’t like where you’re at, you’re gonna have to work hard to get out of it, work hard to get a different job, work hard to get through school. That’s the philosophy we have and something I learned when I was their age, working side jobs and whatnot so I could have gas and insurance money so I could go where I needed to play baseball.

“I hope my story can help them achieve their dreams, and that they don’t dream small. Big dreams can be accomplished no matter where you’re from or where you live or how you grew up. And that’s just as important off the field.”