FAYETTEVILLE – While many of his teammates went home in the 2020 college baseball season following the Covid-19 pandemic, Arkansas pitcher Patrick Wicklander stayed in Fayetteville.
He and several other pitchers met in the weeks following the shutdown to keep in shape and to throw.
But by May, some of his training partners noticed a change in Wicklander. He looked thin. Wicklander estimates that he has lost between 25 and 30 pounds over the course of 2 1/2 weeks.
On May 23rd, the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend, he was supposed to throw a bullpen but called his catcher to tell him he couldn’t make it. According to team trainer Corey Wood, Wicklander was feeling sick and vomiting and decided to go to an emergency clinic to see what was going on.
“The nurse takes me back and she asked about my symptoms,” said Wicklander. “I tell her that her eyes just got big. She runs away without telling me anything and comes back and says, “Hey, we’re going to do a lot of tests on you.” I was kind of in the dark about what was going on. “
Wicklander was a Type 1 diabetic who was unknown to him before he went to the emergency clinic that day.
It wasn’t long before he was in an ambulance on his way to the Washington Regional Medical Center. He said his breathing was difficult and his blood sugar level was measured at 342 milligrams per deciliter and had risen in the emergency clinic, and in the hospital it was measured in the 530s.
“For reference, your body and organs start to shut down at 550,” said Wicklander, “and you fall into a diabetic coma at 600 – just to give you an idea of where I was.”
Wicklander spent “three or four days” in the hospital, including several days in intensive care. During his hospital stay, he said he had two IVs and one drop of insulin in each arm.
“I look left, look right and I see people on ventilators, I see people on breathing tubes,” said Wicklander as he was wheeled through the intensive care unit. “I said, ‘This is not good at all.’
“Of course, being in the intensive care unit isn’t where you want to be, but you have all eyes on you. I had blood drawn every three or four hours and had my blood checked every hour. I was just tired, exhausted – mentally and physically drained. I was just glad I got in there when I did.
“The doctor told me, ‘The reason you still walk is because of how in good shape you are and how active you are. ‘That’s what led me to be called a hiking wonder. “
Shortly after his discharge from the hospital, Wicklander returned to his parents’ home in San Jose, California. He estimates that a few weeks after his hospital stay he visited a baseball facility to start throwing again. Given what he’d been through, he hoped to hit 85 mph on the first fastball he threw.
Instead, the pitch felt effortless. The radar gun showed 92 mph.
“As soon as I found my blood sugar and started getting insulin into my body, it all came back,” said Wicklander. “It didn’t come back slowly. It was like everything was coming together again. It wasn’t just slow progress. “
After Wicklander’s diagnosis, the ups and downs of his first two seasons with the Razorbacks began to make more sense. Wicklander became a weekend starter in the middle of his first season, but his starts were inconsistent even in the postseason.
In 2019, he threw five innings during the NCAA regional championship game against the TCU, but that was sandwiched between two outings at Texas A&M and against Ole Miss in the super region when he failed to get out of the second inning on both occasions.
As the second kid in 2020, Wicklander was keen, throwing a total of 11 innings in his first two starts against Eastern Illinois and Gonzaga, but a total of 4 2/3 innings over the next two weeks against Texas and South Alabama.
“He was a mystery for the first few years where he had these great trips, and then he would have this trip that wasn’t very good at all,” said Matt Hobbs, Arkansas pitching coach. “Now you can look back, and as he said, maybe this has been going on all along, and maybe that’s one of the reasons he was so up and down for the first few years.”
Wicklander said he didn’t want to use his health as an excuse for the times when he wasn’t well placed, but looking back, he said, “It all adds up.”
“There would be days when I would feel like utter crap and days when I would feel great,” said Wicklander. “When you look back on everything, it makes sense.”
Wood recalls a day when the pitchers were doing a group run and Wicklander couldn’t keep up.
“It wasn’t too hard, but it wasn’t easy,” said Wood, “and Wicklander was just so far behind everyone and just looking – you’d just think he was the most unconditional person you’ve seen.”
“If you look back on his first year or last year, we linked some of those bad trips to his blood sugar, his glucose got out of hand.”
It’s been better for Wicklander since he learned to manage his blood sugar. He set personal bests across the board in autumn conditioning and switched to pitching with glasses.
Wicklander also pecks with an insulin pump that is injected into his thigh or abdomen, as well as a sensor that is located on his abdomen. From the hill, the pump could look like a small cell phone in his right back pocket. “I can sit here and proudly tell you it’s been a real blessing for me,” said Wicklander.
Hobbs said he’s seen a more focused pitcher since Wicklander returned to campus last summer.
“Not that he has ever been wildly unfocused, but that has given him something else to consider on a daily basis when it comes to how he takes care of himself,” Hobbs said.
“His job has always been good, but it seems that this has sharpened his focus a bit more. He is really aware of what it takes to make his body feel like it can keep up and exercise. I think he probably feels physically in a better place than ever before.
“You have to deal with something that not a lot of people do. As far as I know, there is no one on our team to deal with it, and they do. So he has to watch what he eats, he has to watch his level – he has to be aware of all of these things. This is not easy for anyone, let alone a college athlete trying to get better at baseball and running the school, and it just gives them something else to put on their plate. I could see that it is very difficult for children to deal with and Pat did a great job. “
Wicklander switched from the bullpen to the Friday starter of the Razorbacks three weeks ago. He was the most reliable starter in an inconsistent rotation in Arkansas that was struggling to get deep into the Games. Wicklander threw 5 innings at Mississippi State, 6 innings against Auburn and 4 innings against Ole Miss and had a 5 1/3 inning relief against Alabama.
Wicklander starts his Game 1 against Texas A&M this weekend and has an ERA of 2.76 in 29 1/3 innings. He’s been better lately, with an ERA of 2.66 in 20 1/3 innings during his 4 games against SEC teams.
He’s also lowered his walks, which was a problem in his first two seasons when he averaged 2.5 and 2.6 walks per nine innings.
That year, Wicklander took an average of 1.8 walks per nine innings, and Hobbs described the balls outside the strike zone as well missed.
“In the state of Mississippi, I thought he was missing really well – a ball or two off the plate or a ball down or a ball in,” Hobbs said. “He wasn’t missing wildly on the other side or giving fastballs in the other racket’s box or something like that.
“If you walk a few people this way, it’ll be easier to deal with. This is an easier fix. “
Overall, Hobbs said he’s seeing better speed – Wicklander’s Fastball clocked at 96 mph during its launch in the state of Mississippi and is consistently 90-94 mph – and a sharper breaking ball.
“He was very good at giving us consistency in what we can expect from his stuff,” said Hobbs.
Wicklander is just happy to be pitching. The first time he stepped up the hill during fall practice, he said he felt like a pitcher returning from surgery on Tommy John.
“It also gave me a new outlook on life,” said Wicklander. “I almost couldn’t be here now.
“I am extremely grateful.”
