'Extraordinarily exciting': Big day as Big Woo stares down hitters

PHOENIX -- The smiles and high fives said as much as a scoreboard radar gun could have. Rehabbing Brewers ace Brandon Woodruff faced hitters on Friday for the first time in 16 months and deemed the session a success.

“You'll probably see a smile on my face for a lot of the day,” Woodruff said. “Now I want to go in there and break down the mechanics, I want to go down and break down the metrics of everything and try to tidy that up. But that's going to take time. I feel good.”

Woodruff, methodically working back from right shoulder surgery in October 2023, employed his full arsenal over 20 pitches to a pair of hitters, William Contreras and Jake Bauers. Brewers front office executives, coaches and a handful of teammates looked on as Woodruff took the mound in the main stadium at American Family Fields of Phoenix, where the scoreboard was dark. That meant no velocity readings until later, when Woodruff waded through the data collected by the tech stationed throughout the stadium.

For the first time since his start in Miami on Sept. 23, 2023, Woodruff’s mind went not to his shoulder but to pitching when Contreras swung early on a first-pitch slider. Woodruff doubled up with the same pitch and Contreras hit it to the gap. It was the sort of cat-and-mouse that Woodruff, the longest-tenured Brewers player, had missed so much.

“Stepping on that mound, I didn't feel uncomfortable,” he said. “Obviously I was amped up for it, but I didn't feel out of place.”

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His teammates were equally amped.

“I’ve gotten to learn a lot from ‘Big Woo,’ just being around him for the last year,” said left-hander DL Hall, who battled his own injuries last season and now is temporarily sidelined by a strained lat. “I faced a lot of challenges last year, and then to come in and have this happen, it’s another challenge. Seeing how he’s handled it, doing it for a year and a half straight and keeping his nose down and getting healthy, it was really cool to see him persevere.”

Another Brewers lefty, Aaron Ashby, navigated his own long comeback from shoulder surgery in 2023 and has shared his experience with Woodruff as roommates. Ashby has a particular memory of how sore he was the day after facing hitters for the first time and feeling the adrenaline of pitching again.

“I don’t think there’s a single person who’s played with him who isn’t fired up for this day,” Ashby said. “It’s extraordinarily exciting.”

The next test is recovery. Woodruff said he probably won’t have a good gauge on that until Sunday, since he typically is most sore two days after an outing.

Then, he’ll repeat.

“I was nervous, jittery. I mean, it's the first time in a year and a half,” Woodruff said. “I think it went a lot better than I expected it to, which was what I kind of needed. I needed this, I needed to face hitters. I needed Bauers and William to step in the box, you know what I mean? Like, you’ve got an All-Star [Contreras] stepping in the box as the first hitter you've seen in a year and a half, you can't help but get a little adrenaline going.

“So, that was good for me. I got some good feedback, and now it's just go recover and get used to doing this again.”