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MLB

T-Rat Talk: Ryan Birchard

Young Pitcher Has Extensive Track Record Succeeding Against Older Competition
By Kyle Lobner
June 13, 2025

Timber Rattlers pitcher and 2023 fifth round pick Ryan Birchard has had the opportunity to do a lot of things in his brief professional career, but until now settling into one place hasn’t really been one of them. Since graduating from high school Birchard has pitched two seasons of college

Timber Rattlers pitcher and 2023 fifth round pick Ryan Birchard has had the opportunity to do a lot of things in his brief professional career, but until now settling into one place hasn’t really been one of them.

Since graduating from high school Birchard has pitched two seasons of college baseball (he was the highest drafted player ever to come out of Niagara County Community College in Sanborn, New York), played for two collegiate summer league teams and committed to transfer to Oregon before instead opting to sign with the Brewers. He’s since played for three affiliates in the Brewers organization and been assigned to the Arizona Fall League.

Birchard’s current run with the Timber Rattlers, where he pitched his eleventh game of the season on Tuesday, is the longest he’s been with any one team since college. Despite having had to move countless times in recent years, however, Birchard is still getting the hang of it.

“The last time I got called up I was on the road, so I was packing light. But I’m not a very light packer at all. I have a lot of stuff,” Birchard said. “You kind of take what you need and you’ll get everything that you leave behind eventually.”

Now that he’s finally been able to settle into one place with Wisconsin, however, Birchard is having the best season of his professional career to date. He’s already set a new career high with 46 ⅓ innings, his 4.08 earned run average is well below the Midwest League average and he’s struck out 53 batters while navigating some challenges with control. Birchard worked around six walks while throwing four shutout innings on Tuesday and has given out 30 free passes on the season. He said the ability to throw strikes is the biggest key to his success right now.

“When I throw everything over the plate and can throw it where I want to throw it and when I want to throw it, usually good things come from that,” Birchard said.

Birchard’s results back up that assertion. He’s had four outings this season where he walked two batters or fewer, and they’re the four longest starts of his season. That list includes his last outing at home, where he worked 5 ⅔ innings against Cedar Rapids on June 4 and set a new professional high with ten strikeouts.

Like many of his Wisconsin teammates, Birchard is younger than the average player with his role and experience level. He won’t turn 22 until July and is more than two full years younger than the average Midwest League player this season. More than two thirds of the batters he’s faced so far this year have been older than him.

Being one of the younger players in an advanced league, however, is nothing new for Birchard. In 2023 Birchard pitched for Trenton in the MLB Draft League, a six-team showcase league for players who are eligible for that season’s draft. Birchard, who was 19 years old at the time, was the youngest player to pitch for the Thunder that season but nonetheless allowed just one run on two hits over nine innings of work with 16 strikeouts. Birchard was one of eleven members of that Trenton team who went on to be drafted, and the team went 19-7 in the first half to finish four games up on the field.

“We had a great team and a great coaching staff, all of the guys were great. The clubhouse camaraderie was fantastic as well. It got me ready for pro ball. That’s the closest thing to pro ball, playing in the Draft League and it’s not that much different of a schedule from here to that,” Birchard said.

After the 2024 season Birchard faced another challenge, as he was assigned to the prospect-rich Arizona Fall League. Once again Birchard was much younger than most of his teammates, 20 years old in a league where the average player was 23.3, but he posted a 4.20 ERA across 15 innings in an extremely offense-friendly environment: AFL teams had an .807 OPS and scored 6.29 runs per game last fall, as compared to .704 and 4.66 in the Midwest League this season. Fourteen of MLB Pipeline’s top 100 prospects at the time played in the Fall League, and all of them were position players. For Birchard, however, his approach did not change even as the level of competition did.

“It’s still a game, you just go out there and throw the ball over the plate and hopefully good things will happen,” Birchard said.

When Birchard is able to throw strikes he benefits from having defied a trend in the modern game. In an era where pitcher deliveries often look increasingly similar, Birchard has drawn attention for an approach that differs from the norm. It’s the first thing Eric Longenhagen and James Fegan of FanGraphs highlighted in Birchard’s scouting report after ranking him as the #36 prospect in the Brewers organization this spring:

“Baseball is better when there’s a healthy supply of wacky, over-the-top arm slot guys hanging around, and Birchard seems primed to be part of the next wave,” they said, before going on to highlight four distinct pitches in his arsenal and grading both his curve and slider at 55 (above average) on the 20-80 scouting scale.

While Birchard describes his own delivery as “kind of aggressive or violent,” he also said it’s how he’s always thrown and no one has ever made a significant attempt to change it.

“It helps me with what I throw and how I throw. I can throw certain things that other people can’t, because of the way I can throw,” Birchard said.

After missing much of the 2024 season with an oblique injury Birchard struggled down the stretch with Wisconsin, logging just 10 ⅓ regular season innings across five starts and accumulating more walks (14) than strikeouts (13). On an individual level he said his goal remains the same, however: To get better each year.

“Every season I try to do better than the last one. Coming here last year I had a lot of struggles, but I’m doing better now and just always trying to have a better season than the one in the past,” Birchard said.