Overview:
Tyler Bremner surpassed Dillon Tate, the No. 4 selection in 2015, as the highest MLB Draft pick in UCSB baseball history
Tyler Bremner passed on the trip to Atlanta for last week’s Major League Baseball draft.
The Coca-Cola Roxy concert venue is a nice place to visit, especially if they’re celebrating you as a first-round pick.
But UC Santa Barbara’s junior All-American wanted to be home in San Diego, in the embrace of family and friends, for such a life-changing event.
His mother, after all, had grinded out her own extra innings to see him through the most trying baseball season of his life.
Gaucho coach Andrew Checketts was amazed every time Jennifer Bremner gutted through her own grim challenge to make the 200-plus-mile journey to Caesar Uyesaka Stadium to watch her son pitch.
But by early May, her stage-4 breast cancer had made that impossible.
“She was awesome,” Checketts told Noozhawk. “There isn’t any doubt in Tyler’s mind how much his mom cared about him and loved him, and was fighting to hang in there until the draft.”
Tyler tearfully hugged his father, Jason, and sisters Hailey and Sierra, while celebrating with a roomful of relatives and friends when Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred made the televised announcement:
The Los Angeles Angels took UCSB’s star righthander with the No. 2 overall pick, confounding every expert who had constructed a mock draft.
Just a week earlier, the Bremners’ circle of family and friends had gathered for a different kind of celebration: the one of his mother’s life.
Jennifer Bremner had made it all the way through her son’s final Gaucho season before dying on June 11. She was just 54.
“I know she’s watching over me, and I know she’s so proud of me,” Bremner said during a video call with the news media. “She was honestly one of my biggest supporters.
“She came out to all the games, and all the way up to the point where her body wouldn’t let her anymore.
“I know she’s out there watching.”
Sophomore Sensation
Bremner had been closely watched by MLB scouts and executives ever since his Gaucho season of 2024.
His win-loss record of 11-1, earned-run average of 2.54 and strikeout-to-walk ratio of 104-to-21 in 88⅔ innings ranked among college baseball’s best that season.
Bremner continued to flash elite stuff that summer — a fastball that touched 98 mph and a changeup that scouts rated as the best of the entire 2025 draft class — during a nearly flawless stint with Team USA’s collegiate team.
But other “stuff” happened when autumn bled into winter.
“He’d been a little sore, throwing-wise, so we shut him down,” Checketts said. “And then he got sick.
“He got sick in November and December and lost 12 pounds. I don’t know what it ended up being. Bronchitis?
“He’d get a little better and then it would come back. So we sent him home.”
Bremner’s world took a tragic turn for the worse when he got there.
A physical examination just before Christmas revealed that his mother’s cancer had spread from her lungs and was now present throughout her body.
The diagnosis was a death sentence.
It thrust her son back to that terrible year of 2020 — during the early days of COVID-19 — when her condition was first identified as stage 2 breast cancer.
“He had to move out because his mom was going through chemo, and he was going to school (at Scripps Ranch High School),” Checketts said.
“She beat it, and then it came back after his freshman year here at UCSB.”
The weight of the world descended upon Bremner’s thinning, 6-foot-4 frame again last winter just as he was trying to reclaim his strength.
Checketts took it slow when his ace returned to campus in January.
“We knew that with the ramp-up, it was really important to be cautious and careful,” he said. “He didn’t have a full fall, and then he fell far behind physically in December.
“If he said he had a hangnail, I was freaking out.
“If he said he was sore or tired, he was done for the day.”
Starts and Stops
Checketts didn’t let Bremner pitch long enough in his first two starts in mid-February — three innings in each — to get official credit for the win in lopsided games against Campbell and Seattle.
And then the losses came when UCSB entered Big West Conference play. He suffered three in a row from mid-March to early April as the Gauchos’ Friday starter.
Bremner’s worst outing came on March 28 when Long Beach State thumped him for eight hits and six runs — five earned — in the first 3⅔ innings of a 9-6 defeat at Blair Field.
“He was behind on his breaking ball,” Checketts said. “He hadn’t gotten a lot of touches with it until mid-January.
“His command wasn’t very sharp. He was throwing a lot of fastballs down the middle.”
The Gauchos’ league record plummeted to 5-8 by the time Bremner lost a 1-0 pitcher’s duel to UC Davis on April 4.
“There was a lot of pressure on him, and a lot of it was in terms of the draft,” Checketts said. “He wasn’t super-sharp when he came out of the gates.
“It’s hard, between starts, to be counting the money you’re losing, or think about how that can affect you.
“He didn’t verbalize that, but he’s human.”
By midseason, Bremner’s ERA had risen to 4.24 — and all projections of him as a top-five draft pick had vanished.
“Getting away from the field in those moments wasn’t any less stressful because of what was going on with his mom,” Checketts said.
“For a while there, he didn’t have anywhere to turn in terms of relief from the pressure.”
Grace Under Fire
Jen Bremner found her own outlet that April. She wrote a poignant essay about her faith for “Conquer: the journey informed” — an online platform for those affected by cancer.
“I feel like I am swimming in the ocean, desperately trying to get to shore, but the current is too strong and is relentlessly pulling me back out to sea,” she wrote. “I don’t know what my future holds or how much time I have left.
“I don’t know if there will come a day when I no longer want to endure the pain and suffering without the desired result.
“For now, I persevere through the treatment and sickness hoping for brighter days and more time with my loved ones.”
Her son found his own refuge at about the same time. It was atop the baseball mound.
“He started throwing the ball better halfway through the season,” Checketts pointed out. “It felt like the field was the place where he could disengage a bit from the off-the-field stress.
“It was where he could go and focus on something else.”
The strikeouts increased as he gained strength and worked through his mechanics.
He whiffed at least 10 batters in six of his last seven starts. He had reached that number in none of his first seven appearances.
Bremner finished the season with a career-best 111 strikeouts. His average of 12.91 per nine innings ranked fifth nationally.
His three-year total of 295 strikeouts broke UCSB’s career record set 42 years ago by Dan Yokubaitis.
“A big thing for me was just getting the arm on time and keeping the fastball riding through the zone,” Bremner said. “I think the only time I ran into some trouble this year was when the arm was a tick late.
“Once I got the arm in sync and started to see the four seam (fastball) go by bats, you just compete out there … It starts flowing and you start rolling, and you feed off the energy of those positive starts.”
The rocket fuel in his right arm, Bremner admitted, was ignited by “the negative energy” of his mother’s illness.
“As she got worse, that’s when I got stronger on the field,” he said.
He felt like he was “pitching angry … or pitching for her … pitching for something bigger than myself.”
Bremner flared up into a nearly untouchable tempest when his mom’s worsening condition forced her to miss his final three outings.
He struck out 33 batters and allowed just three runs in those three games.
Striking Back
His ERA had improved from 4.24 to 3.49 by season’s end. He struck out 35.6% of the batters he faced in his 14 starts and walked only 6.1%.
And yet, his position in most mock drafts barely changed. ESPN and MLB.com both listed him as the No. 18 pick in their final projections.
Baseball America had him a little better at No. 11.
“They did an article on him that did a deeper dive into his season,” Checketts said. “They pointed out that, ‘Yeah, his ERA was a little inflated, but his WHIP (walks plus hits per innings pitched) was actually the best of his career.’
“His chase rate was the best of his career. His walk rate was the best of his career.
“They broke down his stuff to show that his average velocity was up.
“I thought they did a good job of giving some context to his year.”
The Angels did a deep dive of their own
“They scouted him a lot,” Checketts said. “They spent some time with him before the draft … He went down to Angel Stadium the week before.
“They got a chance to meet him.”
Nobody was more impressed with Bremner’s makeup than Angels’ scouting director Tim McIlvaine.
“When you sit and you talk to him, you realize the weight that he had lost over the summer, dealing with everything, and then being able to finally put it back on and get going,” McIlvaine said.
“Once you sit down and talk through the whole situation with him, it kind of puts all those worries to bed for us.”
He said he’d put the second half of Bremner’s season “up against anybody in the country.”
Bremner also fit the mold of many of the Angels’ previous first-round picks: college players who can make a quick ascension to the majors.
An elite changeup, McIlvaine said, should give Bremner that opportunity.
“Whenever he’s in trouble, he can go to that changeup,” he said. “He can get outs with that.
“We like his fastball outs with the 98 (mph).
“He’s 6-foot-4 and he’s going to put on more weight still. There’s a lot that you can really dream on.”
Moneyball
Bremner’s lower projections in the mock drafts also enabled the Angels to sign him last week at a bargain price. His bonus of $7,689,525 was more than $2.5 million less than the slot value of a No. 2 pick.
The savings have helped the club sign several other top draftees — high school stars who had the negotiating leverage of a college scholarship offer — to contracts well above their own slot values.
But the machinations of big-league baseball economics haven’t diminished the spiritual lift that Bremner felt when the Angels called his cell phone moments before Manfred announced their pick.
He pulled the phone away from his ear, turned toward his father and choked out the words.
“I’m going to get picked here.”
When the cheering subsided, Bremner admitted to feeling emotionally “overwhelmed” by it all.
“I don’t think this was really something that we thought was a possibility up until really recently, so it was definitely a shock,” he said, “and that’s the emotions coming out.”
He had vented those emotions barely a month earlier by posting a tribute to his late mother on Instagram.
“Saying goodbye to you has been the hardest thing I have had to go through in my life,” he wrote. “Why did this evil disease have to come into the life of such a pure-hearted soul?
“Somehow through all this pain, darkness and suffering there is light. This light will forever shine through the memories I got to experience with her and what she has taught me through the years.”
He continued the message by pointing out how she had “lived her life for me and my sisters.”
“Truly a selfless mother who wanted nothing but the best for her kids,” Bremner wrote. “A proud mom who made me feel loved with every small accomplishment along the way.”
Bremner signed off with the words, “Rest easy my angel.”
And now he is an Angel himself, perhaps in more ways than one.
“I want to spread awareness about cancer,” he told one of his interviewers. “I want to be a good person just as much as I want to be a good baseball player.
“I think that’s something she really taught me.”
