Following surgery, third-year lefty Neeck has come a long way
After six innings of Saturday’s game against Duke, the Wahoos were clinging to a one-run lead. Three of the next five hitters due up for the Blue Devils were left-handed. UVa starter Mike Vasil was at 95 pitches and had just given up a two-run home run in the sixth to RJ Schreck, another lefty, to cut the UVa lead to 4-3.
So Brian O’Connor made the move to bring Brandon Neeck out of the bullpen to start the seventh inning.
The third-year lefty, who has increasingly gained the trust of his head coach throughout the season, again did his job.
He coaxed a line-drive double play to escape a one-out jam with runners on the corners then struck out Schreck to start the eighth before giving way to closer Stephen Schoch.
The Wahoos wound up winning by that 4-3 margin. And with those 1.1 scoreless innings, Neeck picked up his third hold of the season. In the process, UVa clinched its first ACC series win at home of the season.
“I’m really proud of him,” O’Connor said of Neeck after the victory. “He’s really come into his own. I think he’ll continue to get better and better.
“He’s in a really good place right now,” said UVa pitching coach Drew Dickinson. “He’s been throwing really well. It’s been a lot of short stints, left-on-left stuff. But he’s not a left-on-left guy. He’s a guy that can be a future starter here, as long as he stays healthy and all those good things.”
Indeed, pitching out of the bullpen was not part of Neeck’s plan when he first arrived as one of the top left-handed pitchers in the country in the class of 2018. He had bigger goals in mind.
“To win a national championship,” Neeck said recently. “To start. To start on the weekend. To have a great college career, which has taken a turn. They’re still possible, but it’s been delayed some.”
It was all initially delayed by a freshman season spent in the trainer’s room, rehabbing from reconstructive surgery on his left shoulder. Then it was delayed again by the COVID-19 pandemic, just as Neeck was getting back on the mound for the Cavaliers.
“That surgery that he had his freshman year in the fall is the most difficult surgery in baseball to come back from, for a pitcher,” O’Connor said. “And so it’s taken him two years.”
Neeck first hurt his pitching shoulder while hitting, during his junior season at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua (NY).
“I took a swing in a game,” he recalled. “I didn’t know exactly what I did at the time.”
He played through the injury for the rest of his high school career and pitched well enough to be ranked by Perfect Game as the No. 6 left-hander and No. 63 overall player in the high school class of 2018. Only two other UVa recruits in that 2018 class, Vasil and outfielder Mike Siani, were ranked higher nationally. Vasil has spent the last three seasons in UVa’s weekend rotation. Siani passed on college baseball after getting picked in the fourth round of the MLB Draft. Infielders Zack Gelof and Nic Kent, two everyday starters for the Wahoos since their freshman year, were among the recruits ranked behind Neeck.
Neeck told MLB teams that he intended to honor his commitment to Virginia and arrived at school that August. But it only took one bullpen session for his shoulder to become a problem. After talking to O’Connor and the team’s athletic trainer, Brian McGuire, Neeck had an MRI on the shoulder. Doctors recommended reconstructive surgery.
He underwent the procedure in September 2018, just weeks into his college career. After the surgery, Neeck got to work.
“I think like any guy, at first when you find out bad news it’s a hard pill to swallow,” McGuire said. “Once he digested that, he approached every day with kind of ‘attack mode.’ Very motivated, very determined.”
The rest of Neeck’s freshman year was spent meeting with McGuire for an hour each day. It wasn’t until he was in the midst of that rehab process that Neeck realized that the odds weren’t exactly on his side.
He wasn’t fazed.
“I actually, kind of as my rehab went on, learned a little bit more about the success rate,” the lefty admitted with a laugh. “There has never been a time I doubted I would get back. There have been bumps in the road but there has never been a point where I didn’t see it in the future.”
McGuire was impressed by the mental maturity and active approach Neeck brought to the rehab process, setting daily goals and asking questions, while targeting long-term milestones along the way.
“It’s really hard to get dealt a bad set of cards,” McGuire said. “So to take an active role, and just take the bull by the horns, the sooner you can accept your hand, I think how quick it is to make that jump to, ‘What do I need to do to make myself better?’ And he did that remarkably quickly.”
Neeck described the plan for his rehab as “slow and cautious.” He was never pushed harder or faster than what he felt comfortable. By the time Virginia finished fall practices in 2019, a year after his surgery, Neeck was throwing bullpen sessions on flat ground from about 50 feet. As fall ball led into the 2020 preseason, the lefty continued to hit more milestones on his checklist. Throwing off the mound for the first time was a meaningful one. Facing hitters in intrasquad scrimmages meant even more.
Then, in the first game of the Cavaliers’ February 22 double-header against Bucknell, Neeck made his UVa debut. He worked the seventh inning, with one strikeout and a pair of walks across 24 pitches. He called it a “humongous” step and that one got his attention.
“Having taken two years away from being in a competitive setting was something that I didn’t think would be much of a challenge,” he said. “But getting myself back mentally to feeling confident in what I’m doing and believing in myself, that actually took some time. That was a point of the recovery that I wasn’t really expecting.”
“Getting guys back out to the mound, in the grand scheme of it, is not the hardest part of all this,” McGuire said. “The hardest part of all this is staying out there. Getting back to what you need to do, and earning the right to get back out there by your performance. And then once you’re out there, deserving the chance to get repeated outings out there.”
Neeck made two more brief appearances in UVa blowout wins before the pandemic shut down the 2020 season in mid-March. Then last September, he passed the two-year anniversary of his shoulder surgery. Feeling like the game had finally slowed down again, Neeck was confident heading into the 2021 preseason. He was no longer rehabbing with McGuire every day, but still checked in a few times a week and remained in constant communications with both the trainer and with Dickinson.
Along the way, Neeck also notched another milestone that McGuire deemed significant: Hitting 90 mph on the radar gun for the first time since surgery.
“I think it’s just a big mental relief to say, ‘You know what, if I really let it go, is this going to hold up?’” McGuire explained. “And when it does, for me it’s a physical milestone, but for them I think it’s a really big mental milestone to say, ‘Gosh, I’m able to do this. Now it’s full steam ahead.’”
The UVa staff remained cautious at the season’s outset. Neeck didn’t make his season debut until the eighth game. He only pitched a full inning in one of his first five appearances. Most of his early outings, particularly against ACC opponents, came as a left-handed specialist, brought on to retire a left-handed hitter during a key spot in the game. Neeck immediately proved effective in that role.
“Anytime a tough lefty is coming up, you can pretty much always count on Neeck to be ready for him,” said Schoch, the Cavaliers’ closer, recalling some advice a coach gave him early in his college career, when the side-winder was working as a right-handed specialist. “It’s not the sexiest thing. Fans aren’t going to be going crazy over a (left)-handed specialist. But coaches love you, and when you get your job done your teammates will be fired up.”
Neeck admits that this spring—trying to stay patient while feeling good and wanting to pitch—has been one of the most challenging steps of his comeback. But his role has grown as he has gained the coaches’ confidence and proven that he is healthy.
He wasn’t charged with a run over his first 7.1 innings pitched, which spanned 10 appearances. He only allowed a hit in three of those. That scoreless streak was snapped during his second appearance in the Cavaliers’ series at Clemson but that outing also marked the first time Neeck had pitched on back-to-back days. A week later against Louisville, he tossed two full innings for the first time.
For Neeck, just as encouraging as hitting those latest in-season milestones has been how his shoulder has felt afterward.
“Just like I did at high school. Maybe a little sore, maybe nothing at all,” he said. “Like at Clemson, when I went back-to-back days, when I pitched Sunday, it didn’t feel like I’d pitched the day before. After Louisville, I was sore, but nothing you wouldn’t expect. Nothing the normal pitcher doesn’t feel after pitching.”
Neeck says his fastball velocity has recently climbed back up into the mid-90s range he was hitting in high school. He admitted that it has been a work in progress getting his stuff back fully but he feels confident with the command of both his fastball and slider. On days when he doesn’t have his best stuff, he has leaned on what he learned watching from the UVa dugout across three seasons. And most importantly, when he’s on the mound, he’s no longer thinking about his reconstructed shoulder.
“People that have the chance to come watch us play and get to see Brandon pitch, they don’t understand all the behind-scenes work that he does on a daily basis,” said McGuire. “Even though he’s still out there on the field and doing what he does at a very, very elite level, his diligence, his work ethic, and the way that he approaches each day, those are the things that I wish people really would see.”
“The kid loves to pitch. The kid loves to be on the field. Every time he gets out there, I’m like a proud dad,” said Dickinson. “And it’s even more exciting now that he’s starting to come back into his own, and it’s not about like, ‘How does my shoulder feel?’ That’s gone. Now it’s about competing and having success, and he’s doing that.”
The two-run home run that Neeck surrendered in Sunday’s loss to Duke (while again pitching on back-to-back days) raised his ERA on the season to 3.27. He’s given up 10 hits, struck out 16, and walked five in 11.0 innings over his 14 appearances. He has only allowed one of 11 inherited runners to score and his three holds are tied for second on the staff.
Neeck is still holding onto the long-term goal of working as a starter for the Wahoos, and that remains an option for Virginia coaches as well. For that to happen, he would need to regain the conditioning required to throw 95-100 pitches in a game. His high this season is 43.
But for the rest of this year, Neeck only has one concern: Doing his part out of the bullpen to help the Wahoos make a push for the postseason.
“I remember after my first or second appearance this season talking to one of my good friends and just getting emotional,” he said. “Feeling like, wow. Finally, after two years of being here, three years, finally to actually contribute feels so amazing.”
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