Friday, April 18

Nineteen long, emotional months since surgery to repair a shredded right shoulder, the Brewers’ Brandon Woodruff is ready for the next big step in his comeback. 

Just go pitch. 

He’s slated to begin a 30-day rehab assignment on Saturday night at Triple-A Nashville, where Woodruff is scheduled to work about four innings against the Cardinals’ top affiliate. The plan calls for Woodruff to rejoin the Major League team after each outing to undergo his usual treatment and throw a between-starts bullpen session, then head out on the road again. If history is any guide for a pitcher coming back from a surgery as significant as Woodruff’s, the Brewers will use most or all of the 30 allotted days, putting his potential return to the Major League rotation somewhere in the middle of May.  

“I’ve done all the simulated games, I had the one [Major League] game in spring and checked that box. Now it becomes, ‘Just play baseball,’” Woodruff said last weekend in Milwaukee. “I had another talk with [the surgeon, Dr. Keith] Meister before we broke camp, and he was like, ‘Now you need to go play baseball, man. That’s it.’

“How the rest will go, I don’t know. I have to bounce back a couple of times. It’s competition, but also, I’m understanding that the goal here is to just bounce back.”

Recently, Woodruff has had a lot more good days on the recovery front than bad. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been bad days, and Woodruff might talk more some day about what he’s learned through this process. 

“Some days, those [nasty] thoughts want to creep in,” he said. “That’s just normal.”

Those days are hard. They are a reminder that Woodruff hasn’t pitched a meaningful game since September 2023, when his shoulder started barking with the Brewers on the cusp of a division title. 

“That’s about 19 months ago, and I sit in the dugout now and, I swear, I don’t even remember 2024,” Woodruff said. “I still feel like I’m stuck in ’23. It’s all a blur that’s gone by. I’m doing my thing, but I’m just sitting in the dugout and that pisses me off. 

“There’s been really good days and some really tough days. There’s been some weeks where I’m like, ‘I don’t know ...’ And then you have a stretch of good weeks and you go, ‘All right, I got it. I’m back.’ It’s riding that rollercoaster, just like riding a baseball season.”

With his rehab assignment imminent, Woodruff was fighting two competing thoughts. On one hand, his logical self says the most important thing this season is getting healthy. On the other hand, once he steps foot on a mound in a game, whether in the Minors or Majors, any concept of “rehab” is replaced by a will to win. Lately, he’s been working with the Brewers’ pitching gurus to maximize his arsenal, which is behaving a little differently than it did pre-surgery. For his whole career, Woodruff felt comfortable with his fastball and changeup and struggled to spin breaking balls. But for now, that comfort level has flipped. 

He feels urgency to get it right. In the very best-case scenario, Woodruff could help the Brewers win a berth in another postseason. 

“That’s one of the big reasons I signed back here. I needed to wear this uniform again and I thought this is the best chance for me to get back to the pitcher I can be,” he said. “Just thinking about it, it’s a long journey, and it’s hard, and there’s not been many cases of this surgery. There’s been successes, but it’s a shoulder. Doing what I’ve done and taking my time with it is going to be best for me. 

“But I don’t think I realized what it was going to entail and how long this was going to take. I’ve learned you can’t push it. But I feel good, man. I’m throwing on a schedule and when I go out for a bullpen, I can work on stuff. That part has been fun. That’s what I enjoy the most about this whole journey; I love pitching in games, but all of the in-between stuff, when you have a bad outing or a stretch of them, it’s like, ‘How do you get back on track?’ That’s my favorite thing.”

He’ll spend the next month trying to find a track that leads back to the Brewers’ starting rotation.  

“I don’t want to give away any tricks, but I’ve been trying new stuff,” Woodruff said. “That’s been a lot of fun.”

• While Woodruff’s return is good news, and right-hander Tobias Myers is scheduled to follow for Nashville on Sunday for his second rehab start since going down with an oblique injury, there was one setback of note as the Brewers opened their series against the D-backs. Right-hander Aaron Civale, on the injured list with a hamstring injury, has hit a hitch, manager Pat Murphy said. The Brewers were still evaluating Civale as of Friday afternoon and weren’t ready to talk about an updated timeline. Previously, Civale was expected back in the big leagues by the end of April. 

• After a run in theaters last fall, the documentary film about the 1982 Brewers, “Just A Bit Outside,” was available on your television as of Friday. The film, from director and producer Sean Hanish and producer Kelly Kahl, the former head of CBS Entertainment, is available to stream for free on The Roku Channel from now through June 30, with no subscription or signup required. The Roku Channel can be accessed on Roku devices and TVs, as well as online at TheRokuChannel.com, through the Roku Mobile app, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung TVs, and Google TV and other Android TV OS devices.

• Picking the most-stacked affiliate in the Brewers system was an easy call for MLB Pipeline’s prospect experts. They, of course, chose a Single-A Carolina club led by shortstop Jesús Made. You can read up on the other prospect-rich affiliates across baseball here.

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