Dreams realized together
Brewers’ Topa, Bickford break into the majors
The Milwaukee Brewers’ 12-1 loss to the Detroit Tigers on Tuesday was easily their worst game of the season.
But for Justin Topa and Phil Bickford, it’s a day they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.
The right-handers both made their major-league debuts out of the bullpen, Topa pitching two innings and Bickford taking over for him in the eighth. In doing so, they became the first Milwaukee pitchers since Brandon Kintzler and Mark Rogers on Sept. 10, 2010, to break in on the same day.
In an even more interesting twist, the 29-year-old Topa and 25-year-old Bickford were roommates last season at advanced Class A Carolina and become
buddies quickly.
Talk about serendipity. “Justin Topa helped my career a lot,” Bickford said Tuesday, shortly after joining the Brewers from the team's alternate training site in Appleton. Topa was recalled from Appleton on Monday.
“We were road roommates and he was going through a lot at the time, and I was in a spot where I was getting an opportunity to show the Brewers that I'm a pitcher that can go out there and help teams win games. He was in the same boat.
“We honestly kind of fed off each other, so it's very ironic that we're both here right now. I think it's very cool. He's an amazing human being.”
Topa's path to the Brewers included two Tommy John surgeries, the first in 2011 when playing at Long Island University and the second in 2015 while playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates. There also were two stints with the same team in independent ball in 2017-18 and a short dalliance with the Texas Rangers later in '18.
How did all that lead to Topa connecting with the Brewers? Social media, of all things.
“That offseason of '18 was when the Brewers kind of reached out basically via a Twitter video that got a lot of views through Pitching Ninja, just throwing at the facility near my house,” Topa recalled. “It kind of blew up, and that was the first conversation starter with the Brewers.”
Topa signed with Milwaukee a few days later, and in 33 relief appearances split between Carolina and Class AA Biloxi in 2019, he went 0-6 with a 3.38 earned run average and 41 strikeouts in 40 innings.
While the numbers didn't necessarily jump off the page, it was Topa's fastball and developing slider that had the Brewers intrigued.
He'd built a portable mound out of wood during the pandemic shutdown and had been throwing to a high-school catcher when he received the call early last month that he was being added to Milwaukee's 60-player pool and sent to Appleton. There, he quickly made an impression.
Topa's first major-league pitch was a fastball clocked at 98 mph. He surrendered a two-run home run to Victor Reyes and another hit but didn't issue a walk and struck out a pair.
“It's awesome,” Topa said of the experience of being called up, just hours before pitching. “Any ballplayer that plays for an extended period, or even just growing up around the game, wants to get that phone call. It's a lot of excitement, lot of emotion – especially calling the family and letting them know after the ups and downs that the dream has come true.”
While Topa could be labeled a grinder, Bickford was highly touted from a young age and actually was drafted in the first round twice – 10th overall by the Toronto Blue Jays in 2013 (he didn't sign and went to junior college) and 18th overall by the San Francisco Giants in 2015.
Bickford came to the Brewers in 2016 in a deadline-day trade but a series of setbacks that included his second 50game suspension for a positive drug test – the first one came while he was with the Giants – and a broken hand that required surgery in 2017 sent him from the “can't miss” category to “probably not.”
But Bickford got rave reviews from farm director Tom Flanagan for his diligence, and after re-establishing his career in 2018 with Carolina, he put together a terrific 2019 with the Mudcats that saw him go 3-0 with a 2.48 ERA in 20 outings and 53 strikeouts in 32 2/3 innings.
He finished the season with 14 consecutive scoreless appearances. It was a body of work impressive enough to have merited inclusion in the 60-man pool, and after nearly two months in Appleton Bickford finally broke through to the majors on Tuesday.
Bickford doesn't rely on big velocity, rather a cross-body motion that makes the ball tough for the hitter to pick up.
He had a tough go of it in his debut, hitting the first two batters he faced on the hand (the first, JaCoby Jones, suffered a fracture) and allowing four hits and four runs along with a pair of strikeouts over his inning of work.
The hope is to learn from and build off the experience, just as Bickford has repeatedly done to get to this point.
“I don't know if doubt's the word,” Bickford said when asked if he ever doubted he'd reach the majors. “But there's definitely times where a lot of players go through stuff in their career that they don't necessarily want to go through, and when I learned to turn the negatives into positives and to learn from it, it helped me a lot in making me who I am today.”
Peterson’s heart back home
Infielder/outfielder Jace Peterson tries to keep his mind on the game when he's on the field but otherwise he can't stop thinking of friends and family in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which was devastated on Aug. 27 by Hurricane Laura.
Wife Brianna and their two daughters safely evacuated to Texas but Peterson said many people he knows back home lost everything.
“I was more fortunate than a lot of other people down there,” Peterson told reporters Wednesday. “I have some roof damage and a little bit of water damage in the ceiling of the kitchen but very minimal compared to what a lot of other people are going through and lost.”