Overview:
Tyler Bremner, the No. 2 pick in last year’s Major League Baseball Draft, has pitched 48 strikeouts in 34 innings with a 4.24 earned run average for the high-A Tri-City, Washington Dust Devils this season
Tyler Bremner needed a break.
The midseason, all-star break, that is … and it might be just the cure for what’s ailed him.
The 22-year-old former ace of the UC Santa Barbara baseball team pitched the final out for the American League minor leaguers in their 6-1 victory over the National League in last week’s MLB All-Stars Futures Game.
The contest was part of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Weekend at Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park.
“The body feels fine, arm feels fine, stuff feels great,” said Bremner, who was selected No. 2 overall by the Los Angeles Angels in last year’s MLB draft.
“So right now, it’s just about staying healthy, staying on the field and stacking weeks until I’m fully back.”
He wasn’t feeling so healthy 10 weeks ago when an undisclosed illness forced him off the diamond in the second inning of a minor-league game in Spokane, Washington.
Baseball pundits had been predicting a late-season call-up to the big leagues for Bremner after his first four outings with the Angels’ high-A affiliate at Tri-City, Washington.
He allowed only two earned runs in 16⅔ innings — an ERA of 1.08 — with 25 strikeouts and just five walks.
But he missed nearly a full month of baseball when the illness morphed into a lingering fatigue.
Bremner’s results took a turn for the worse when he got back on the mound in early June.
Entering this weekend, he’s allowed 14 earned runs in 17⅓ innings — an ERA of 7.37 — in his last six starts. He was unable to get through three innings in four of his last six starts.
It was reminiscent of the start of his final season at UCSB in 2025.
“He got sick in November and December and lost 12 pounds,” Gaucho coach Andrew Checketts told Noozhawk. “I don’t know what it ended up being. Bronchitis?
“He’d get a little better and then it would come back.”
Slow Start
Bremner had gone 11-1 with a 2.54 ERA as a sophomore, but he struggled to start that junior season.
He took the loss in three straight Big West Conference games, from mid-March to early April.
His ERA crested at 4.24 — not terrible, but a far cry from what’s expected of a projected first-round draft pick.
Bremner rounded into shape, however, in the last half of UCSB’s season.
He paired a four-seam fastball that touches 98 mph with one of the best changeups in college baseball to strike out at least 10 batters in six of his last seven starts.
He had accomplished that 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.
“It seems crazy to me how long the record actually stood,” Bremner said. “It was cool to come in and be that guy and to do it in three years, not four.
“I had a slow start my junior year, but it was a mark I wanted to reach.
“I don’t know if a switch just flipped and I was able to get rolling, but I punched out like 10-plus guys in my last six games or something to get there.”
Bremner lowered his ERA to 3.49 by season’s end … and elevated his name back up the MLB draft board.
Last Saturday was one year to the day that he signed with the Angels for a bonus of $7.69 million.
“The Angels weren’t even on my radar, to be honest, until about less than an hour before the draft,” he said. “That’s when I got some information that maybe there was some interest.
“From my understanding, my range in the draft was more in that nine-to-16 area.
“But you don’t start hoping, you don’t start guessing, it’s just ‘Hey, this draft’s going to happen, and whatever does happen, just celebrate it.’”
The Angels bypassed two higher-rated pitching prospects to take Bremner with the No. 2 pick.
Baseball America had predicted that he would go to the Oakland Athletics at No. 11.
Both ESPN and MLB.com thought he would be picked even lower — by the Arizona Diamondbacks at No. 18.
But the Angels believed Bremner had been undervalued by his illness-impacted, slow start.
They also saw the opportunity to sign him for $2.5 million less than the slot value of a No. 2 pick.
The savings enabled them to sign several other top draftees to bonuses well above their own slot values.
That second-pick strategy did stir plenty of second-guessing from the baseball world. It’s also put Bremner under a microscope this summer.
“A lot of guys said, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of pressure on you this year … How are you feeling?’” he said. “But it’s like, ‘Hey, if you’re playing this sport, that’s the exact spot you want to be in.’”
A Gaucho Get
Bremner, a 2022 graduate of San Diego’s Scripps Ranch High School, was as blindsided by UCSB’s scholarship offer in 2020 as he was by last year’s draft.
“It wasn’t something that had been hugely on my radar,” he said. “I was going into my sophomore year of high school so, honestly, I was pretty stoked just getting the opportunity to play college baseball.
“I felt like it was a perfect situation … not in my backyard, but far enough away.
“UCSB is also one of the best pitching development schools on the West Coast, and it’s skyrocketed ever since I got there.”
Bremner’s All-America, sophomore season as a Gaucho led to his selection to USA Baseball’s Collegiate National Team in the summer of 2024.
The stands in Greensboro, North Carolina were full of MLB scouts when he pitched three hitless innings with four strikeouts in a victory over Chinese Taipei.
“It was really a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Bremner said.
He roomed with Anthony Eyanson, a pitcher for UC San Diego who would transfer to NCAA champion LSU just a few months later.
“I remember talking with him in the hotel room about hitting the transfer portal,” Bremner said. “He was like, ‘Dude, let’s go to Florida State and team up with Jamie (Arnold, a fellow national team pitcher) and win it all.’
“He pulls that trigger, and then is getting all these calls in the hotel room.
“I was like, ‘Gosh, this is a crazy experience.’”
Bremner opted for the status quo.
“I was like, ‘I’ve got to stay loyal to my Santa Barbara people, and I just I don’t want to leave,’” he said. “Going there ended up being an awesome choice, obviously.
“I loved my experience in Santa Barbara.”
Flora Arrangement
He was on a plane to Philadelphia for the Futures Game last week when he watched the MLB draft on a back-seat screen.
Bremner got to see Jackson Flora, his former UCSB teammate, get chosen by the San Francisco Giants with the No. 4 selection.
“It was cool to see someone I knew get picked that high,” he said. “He is stoked.
“It’s cool to see that more and more pitchers are just running through there and becoming beasts.”
Flora, the fourth Gaucho pitcher in the last decade to be drafted in the first round, has sought Bremner’s advice about what he should now expect.
“We still keep in touch and talk every once in a while,” Flora said. “A lot of the times it’s just about random stuff, just catching up.
“But I’ve definitely talked to him about his experience with all that, and he helps me through it.”
Bremner makes no predictions about what lies ahead for himself.
Although the Angels have been known to rush their high draft picks to the big leagues, they do have incentive for keeping him in the minors the rest of this season.
If Bremner is kept off the Angels’ 40-man roster, he won’t be affected by next year’s possible walkout of the Major League Baseball Players Association in its escalating contract dispute with the owners.
That would allow him to pitch in the minors next summer instead of getting sidelined by a boycott.
He admits that his development this summer was stunted from having sat out a month.
“It’s been a little slower, obviously, than I’d like,” Bremner said. “I wish I could just roll through this whole season and be 100%, but it is what it is.
“But I’ve been ramping up and trying to get back to full starting, with like 90 pitches a game.”
He was picked for the Futures Game based on his MLB.com ranking of No. 10 among all pitching prospects. He was ranked 44th overall — the only Angel in the top 100.
Bremner wound up throwing just three pitches last Sunday — all fastballs — to finish the Futures Game. The first two missed inside, but the third found the lower outside corner of the strike zone.
Josiah Hartshorn launched the 97.3-mph offering to the warning track in centerfield — 387 feet from home plate — where it was caught for the last out.
Bremner was the last of 10 American League farmhands to pitch. Eyanson, his former Team USA roommate, got the win.
The former Gaucho feels ready to pitch a lot more this summer.
“I’ve been really trying to work on being efficient, which is something I’ve struggled with in the past,” he said. “I throw a lot of strikes and get a lot of strikeouts, but I’m also deep into counts.
“I want to go out there and get some quick outs and eat innings and be that that guy who can go six, seven, eight innings, week in and week out.”
It’s the talk of a pitcher who’s feeling like $7.69 million dollars again.
