T-Rat Talk: Bishop Letson

It’s not all that far from Floyds Knobs, Indiana to Appleton, but Timber Rattlers pitcher Bishop Letson has still made the trip faster than most.

Bishop Letson, hello? pic.twitter.com/CMJBrYMWuj

— Curt Hogg (@CyrtHogg) April 5, 2025

Letson was 18 years old and freshly graduated from high school when the Brewers selected him in the eleventh round of the 2023 draft, signing him away from a commitment to pitch at Purdue. Players who start their professional careers that young often take their time working their way through the organization but that was not true for Letson, as he broke camp with a full season team (the Carolina Mudcats) to make his professional debut and allowed just one earned run across his first three appearances.

After just 16 appearances and 14 starts in the Carolina League in 2024 the Brewers promoted Letson again, this time to Wisconsin. Through Tuesday’s games Letson was the fifth youngest pitcher to appear in a Midwest League game this season and over three full years younger than the average player in the league. In his Timber Rattlers debut on Saturday he recorded ten outs in his first ten batters faced before running into trouble in the fourth inning with back-to-back walks.

“It didn’t go bad, it didn’t go excellent. I think that it was just a decent day,” Letson told the Timber Rattlers Review postgame podcast following the outing. “I felt like the fourth inning I was kind of falling off to the left, having a hard time getting it in the zone and noticing that guys had maybe changed their approach a little bit. As I move on and mature and get better as a pitcher, I think it was a good learning piece for me today.”

2025 #BrewersFarm Top 100 Prospects

⚾️ #16 ⚾️

RHP Bishop Letson@LetsonBishop #Brewers #ThisIsMyCrew pic.twitter.com/zCHownxRCB

— Brewers Farm (@thebrewersfarm) March 18, 2025

Just reaching the Midwest League at such a young age and with such limited professional experience puts Letson in rare company. Timber Rattlers pitching coach Michael O’Neal said Letson’s rapid rise demonstrates that he “has something special.”

“The arm’s special. He gets a lot of extension, it’s like in the top five percent in all of baseball, and what he does is different than anybody else in professional baseball with his arm and his big heater, and there’s a reason why he can make 93-95 look 95-97 to guys. So he’s got a lot of characteristics I know Major League Baseball values,” O’Neal said.

Letson throws four pitches but the pitch talent evaluators seem to mention most often is one that he refers to as a slider but is commonly classified as a sweeper.

“I throw a four-seam, two-seam, slider and changeup. I would say that I really like throwing my slider, I’m pretty confident throwing just about anything else, but I would say that’s a pitch I really lean on,” Letson told reporters at Media Day on Wednesday.

Letson leaned especially heavily on the slider/sweeper on Saturday, noting that Cedar Rapids’ lineup featured a lot of right handed hitters and batters looking to make contact out in front of the plate. Brewers Senior Vice President of Player Operations and Baseball Administration Tom Flanagan specifically highlighted that pitch while naming Letson as one of the players to watch in this year’s Spring Breakout game.

And one more #Brewers arm: RHP Bishop Letson pic.twitter.com/kZzS4st4xP

— Josh Norris 🐻 (@jnorris427) May 29, 2024

“He has all the pitches. He’s very projectable,” Flanagan told Adam McCalvy. “He certainly needs to work on commanding his stuff, but his arsenal is really strong. He throws a sweeper that’s probably his best pitch, and two types of fastballs, a four-seam and a two-seam, and his fourth pitch is probably his changeup, and that’s a decent pitch for him as well. He’s a guy who, as soon as he gets better at commanding his stuff – which is natural for a 20-year-old trying to make it in pro ball – he could have a high ceiling.”

O’Neal, who also coached Letson last season with Carolina, praised the young pitcher’s mental growth over the last year.

“His maturation from last year to this year has been incredible. He’s put a lot of effort into being more mature between outings, learning from mistakes and not letting the same mistake happen twice. So it’s been fun to watch the off the field stuff, and then on the field the fastball execution today and in general this whole spring training and early in the season have been very good compared to last year,” O’Neal said.

O’Neal isn’t the only one that has been watching Letson grow across his early pro career. MLB Pipeline also cited a noticed improvement in his confidence as the 2024 season went along.

Bishop Letson spun 4.1 great innings in his last outing, his longest of his first pro season: 4.1 IP / 1 H / 1 R / 6 K

Letson ranks 90th-percentile or better in A-ball in K% (35%), Contact% (61%), and CSW (35%)#ThisIsMyCrew pic.twitter.com/O9FQUuLppp

— Brewers Player Development (@BrewersPD) May 20, 2024

“Letson showed more willingness to go right after hitters the more pro experience he gained, and the additional confidence may only go with added experience in year two,” they said in his scouting report. Letson walked 17 batters in his first 34 innings with Carolina in 2024, then gave up just ten free passes in his final 29 ⅓.

If Letson is able to maintain or build upon the momentum of his first pro season then he’s likely to continue to move up prospect lists in the months ahead. Those accolades, however, aren’t something he spends much time thinking about.

“I think to me I don’t really look at it that much. Everyone pitches once a week, and I think the prospect numbers don’t really mean much to me. You see guys that should be ranked that aren’t ranked and they go out and shove every week and it’s kind of like, “oh wow, why is this guy not top 20, top 10, whatever?’ but that’s what really lets you know that the rankings don’t really mean much,” Letson said.

While Letson is young for a pitcher at his level, he fits right in with his Timber Rattlers teammates. Opening Night starter Manuel Rodriguez is 19 years old and became the youngest pitcher to start a game for the Timber Rattlers since the team moved to the High-A level when he took the mound on Friday. Anthony Flores, who worked three scoreless innings in relief of Letson on Saturday, is also only 20. Sunday starter Chandler Welch is 22 but had only pitched one professional regular season game in his career before playing in that game. All of those pitchers also worked under O’Neal last season in Carolina.

“Last year in Carolina we had the youngest full season staff in the history of minor league baseball from a pitching perspective,” O’Neal said. “A lot of these guys had never failed before. So last year they failed for the first time and you watch them and see how they react and now this year it’s like ‘hey, we went through a lot of these learning mistakes. What did we do after? How did we learn from it?’ And this year it’s like ‘hey, remember last year?’ and it’s fun to see that. These guys, just because their age says they’re 18, 19, 20, they don’t act like it.”

Have the @Brewers done it again?

The Brewers have two of the pitchers whose stuff has made the biggest leap forward of anyone in the minors

- Brett Wichrowski (⬅️)
- Bishop Letson (➡️)https://t.co/lVnw9jDJvp pic.twitter.com/aogDsFX0Ir

— Baseball America (@BaseballAmerica) April 26, 2024

Keeping young pitchers healthy can be a challenge, especially as they manage the workload shift from amateur and short-season leagues to full season professional baseball. Letson pitched just 63 ⅓ innings for Carolina last season, leaving a long way to go to reach the typical workload for a full-time starting pitcher. At Media Day he said a big step forward in that regard is his biggest individual goal for 2025.

“One thing for sure, I want to make all my starts this year. Last year I had bad luck with rain in North Carolina, so that’d be big for me just to get on the mound every week and make sure I’m getting all my innings in and fill up the zone, try to execute all of my pitches,” Letson said.

In the meantime, it falls to Estevez and his staff to balance the Timber Rattlers’ effort to win with his young pitchers’ workload and development needs. Even as the centerpieces of his pitching staff get younger, however, he said that his expectations for them do not change.

“Our mentality is always going to be the same: Put this group together, develop the next big league prospects for the Brewers, and that has to be the mindset for every manager at every level,” Estevez said.