T-Rat Talk Tyler Woessner

It was a beautiful night in April, and nearly 4,000 fans packed into Neuroscience Group Field at Fox Cities Stadium to see Timber Rattlers pitcher and 2022 sixth round pick Tyler Woessner take the mound for Wisconsin’s home opener. It was one of the largest crowds ever to watch him pitch, and he didn’t disappoint them.

Woessner retired the first eight Peoria batters he faced that night before giving up a ground ball single, then bouncing back and getting another groundout to complete his third scoreless inning. Eventually he would complete five innings in his Midwest League debut, his longest professional appearance, and he picked up the win as the Timber Rattlers pulled away late to win 8-3. Five days later he faced the Chiefs again and struck out eight batters across five more innings, picking up another win.

The second outing pushed Woessner past another milestone: With ten innings pitched on the season, he had already spent more time on the mound with Wisconsin than he did across two levels in his entire professional debut season in 2022. When he pitched six more innings in his third start of the season in Quad Cities on Saturday, he more than doubled his workload from last year. With slightly more than 20 innings as a professional, Woessner is one of the least experienced Timber Rattlers. He does have extensive big game experience as an amateur, however, as he logged 96 1/3 innings across 19 appearances for Central Arizona College in 2022 and led his team to a National Junior College Athletic Association national championship.

“That’s the greatest place on Earth, right there,” Woessner said of CAC, located between Phoenix and Tucson in Coolidge, Arizona. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, it’s in the middle of the desert, you’ve got just cactuses and bushes all over the place. There’s really nothing to do besides play baseball, so for four years it’s really like, if you want to play baseball you’re going to work hard and you’re going to play, or you’re going to realize you don’t want to play this sport and you’re going to fade out. It really puts perspective on what you want to do in this sport, when you’re out there.”

Congrats to @CAC_BaseballDB9 — your 2022 @NJCAABaseball DI #JUCOWS22 National Champions 🏆🏆 pic.twitter.com/CvrurT2kQp

— JUCO World Series⚾️ (@JUCOWorldSeries) June 5, 2022

The Vaqueros have won four national championships, including two in the last five years under head coach Anthony Gilich. With seasons impacted by COVID and the extra years of eligibility, Woessner pitched for Gilich for parts of four seasons.

“He’s always been able to pitch, but these last couple of years he had a velocity jump,” Gilich said of Woessner. “He’s always worked hard, but in the last couple of years in particular he really kind of matured into like taking care of his body, taking care of his arm health, those kinds of things just got more important to him and he benefitted from it for sure.”

Over 170 players from the program have gone on to be drafted by MLB teams and several have played in the majors, but by being selected in the sixth round Woessner matched the highest selection of any CAC player in the last decade.

“I’ve met so many awesome baseball players. For me, it doesn’t matter what round you get drafted in. I mean, everyone’s so close in talent. So the round doesn’t really matter to me, it’s just however you produce and how hard you work,” Woessner said.

As a professional, however, Woessner had to wait for his opportunity to produce. He faced just 29 batters in 7 2/3 innings across his four appearances in 2022, three with the Arizona Complex League Brewers and one with Carolina. He allowed just four hits and struck out 13 opposing batters in those outings, but his opportunities to show what he could do were limited. In his first full professional season, however, he’s finally getting to work deeper into games.

“I feel comfortable. I definitely feel like I belong here. I can get outs and do everything I need to do to have success,” Woessner said.

Now, however, Woessner faces the challenge of staying healthy and effective for a full minor league season.

“I’m just eating right, working out, recovering correctly and doing anything I can to stay healthy and perform,” Woessner told the Timber Rattlers Review podcast following his win over Peoria on April 16.

Woessner is also working on staying strong deep into games by avoiding his instinct to rush. While many young pitchers are adjusting to professional baseball’s new pace of play rules by reducing the amount of time they take between pitches, Woessner said he’s working on doing the opposite.

“Sometimes I try to work too fast and that tires me out quicker than normal, so just kind of taking my time on the mound to control my breathing and having full confidence in everything I throw,” Woessner said.

It may not be the intended effect of the pitch clock but for a pitcher like Woessner that’s working to control his tempo, having a large illuminated reminder to take his time might actually prove beneficial.

“I’ve definitely noticed that before,” Woessner said of the pitch clock’s impact on his game. “I never really paid attention to it, I’m just trying to work as fast as I can. But visually seeing the clock, it definitely helps me. Five seconds is a lot longer than what you really think, so it definitely does help me slow the process down a little bit.”

At some point, either with Wisconsin or further along in the Brewers organization, Woessner is likely to have the opportunity to be teammates with an old rival. Woessner pitched against 2022 second round pick Jacob Misiorowski last season when the latter was at Crowder College. They each got no-decisions in the game where they faced each other on the mound, but the two teams met again a few days later and Woessner’s Central Arizona team won and eliminated Crowder from the JUCO World Series.

“I thought I was a pretty hard thrower, and then he comes out and he’s throwing like, 99 to 101. It was pretty crazy to see. But it was fun to pitch against him. It was a pitcher’s duel, I’d say,” Woessner said. Misiorowski and Woessner were both briefly with Carolina in 2022 but Woessner’s lone appearance was before Misiorowski’s debut, and Misiorowski was assigned there again to open the 2023 season.

Having grown up in Phoenix before playing in college at Central Arizona, pitching in the midwest in the spring is a new experience for Woessner. He has plenty of teammates who have been here before, however, and they’ve filled him in on what to expect.

“They said it’s probably one of the best places to play,” Woessner said. “The first month or two is going to be freezing, which it has been, so there’s nothing you can really do about that. You’ve just got to somehow stay warm and prepare. But I’m ready for the summertime and the warm weather.”

As for his goals this season, Woessner kept things simple:

“It’s hard to put numbers on it, but I definitely want to win a lot of baseball games. I want to strike out a lot of hitters, keep the ERA low, just win as many games as possible,” Woessner said.

Through three starts Woessner is meeting all of those objectives. He’s picked up the win in all three games, has a 1.69 ERA and has struck out 18 batters in 16 innings. Back in the desert, Gilich has his hands full with his own team, who clinched a conference championship over the weekend, but he has been taking the opportunity to monitor Woessner’s play and said he’s not surprised by his success.

“He’s a good one,” Gilich said. “He can throw multiple pitches for strikes, he can go deep into games, he holds his velocity, and he’s competitive. So on the days he doesn’t have his best stuff he can get outs with just his competitiveness. So no, it doesn’t surprise me at all.”

Tyler Woessner (2022 6th-rounder) is off to a strong start for the @TimberRattlers. His last start on Sunday:

5 IP / 4 H / 1 R / 1 BB / 8 K#ThisIsMyCrew pic.twitter.com/LsAhGS5ejz

— Brewers Player Development (@BrewersPD) April 19, 2023