FAYETTEVILLE — While many of his teammates went home after the covid-19 pandemic shut down college baseball’s 2020 season, Arkansas pitcher Patrick Wicklander stayed in Fayetteville.
He and a few other pitchers met in the weeks following the shutdown to stay in shape and throw.
But by May, some of his workout partners noticed a change in Wicklander. He looked skinny. Over the course of 2 1/2 weeks, Wicklander estimates he lost between 25 and 30 pounds.
On May 23, the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend, he was supposed to throw a bullpen, but phoned his catcher to tell him he wouldn’t make it. According to team trainer Corey Wood, Wicklander had been experiencing nausea and vomiting, and decided to visit an urgent care clinic to inquire about what was wrong.
“The nurse takes me back and she asked my symptoms,” Wicklander said. “I’m telling her and her eyes just got wide. She runs off without telling me anything, and she comes back and says, ‘Hey, we’re going to run a lot of tests on you.’ I was kind of in the dark about what was going on.”
Unknown to him before he left for the urgent care clinic that day, Wicklander was a Type 1 diabetic.
Before long he was in an ambulance on his way to Washington Regional Medical Center. He said his breathing was labored and his blood sugar level was measured at 342 milligrams per deciliter and rising at the urgent care clinic, and at the hospital it was measured in the 530s.
“For reference, your body and organs start to shut down at 550,” Wicklander said, “and you go into a diabetic coma at 600 — just to give you an idea of where I was at.”
Wicklander spent “three or four days” in the hospital, including multiple days in the ICU. During his hospital stay he said he had two IVs and an insulin drip in each arm.
“I look to my left, look to my right and I see people on ventilators, I see people on breathing tubes,” Wicklander said of being wheeled through the ICU. “I was like, ‘This ain’t good at all.’
“Being in the ICU, it’s not where you want to be, obviously, but you have all eyes on you. I had blood drawn every three or four hours, and got my blood checked every hour. I was just tired, exhausted — mentally, physically drained. I was just glad I was able to get in there when I did.
“The doctor did tell me, ‘The reason you’re still walking is because of how in shape and how active you are.’ That kind of led to me being called a walking miracle.”
Not long after he was released from the hospital, Wicklander returned to his parents’ home in San Jose, Calif. He estimates that a couple of weeks after his hospitalization, he visited a baseball facility to begin throwing again. Given what he had been through, he hoped to hit 85 mph on the first fastball he threw.
Instead, the pitch felt effortless.The radar gun read 92 mph.
“As soon as I figured out my blood sugar, started getting insulin in my body, everything started coming back,” Wicklander said. “It didn’t slowly come back. It was like everything started coming back on top of one another. It wasn’t just a slow progression.”
After Wicklander’s diagnosis, the up-and-down nature of his first two seasons with the Razorbacks began to make more sense. Wicklander became a weekend starter midway through his freshman season, but his starts were inconsistent, even into the postseason.
In 2019, he threw five shutout innings during the NCAA regional championship game against TCU, but that was sandwiched between a pair of outings at Texas A&M and against Ole Miss in the super regional, when he failed to get out of the second inning both times.
As a sophomore in 2020, Wicklander was sharp and threw a combined 11 innings in his first two starts against Eastern Illinois and Gonzaga, but he pitched a combined 4 2/3 innings the next two weeks against Texas and South Alabama.
“He was kind of an enigma his first couple of years to where he’d have these great outings, and then he’d have this outing that wasn’t very good at all,” Arkansas pitching coach Matt Hobbs said. “Now you can look back, and like he said, maybe this has been going on the whole time and maybe this is one of the reasons why he was so up and down the first couple of years.”
Wicklander said he doesn’t want to use his health as an excuse for the times he didn’t pitch well, but looking back he said “everything does add up.”
“There would be days I would be feeling like absolute crap and days I would feel great,” Wicklander said. “Looking back on everything, it does make sense.”
Wood recalls a day when the pitchers went for a group run and Wicklander couldn’t keep up.
“It wasn’t anything too hard, but it wasn’t easy,” Wood said, “and Wicklander was just so far behind everybody and just looked — you would just think he was the most unconditioned person you’ve seen.
“If you look back to his freshman year or last year, we chalk up some of these bad outings to his blood sugar, his glucose was out of whack.”
Things have gone better for Wicklander since he learned to manage his blood sugar. He set personal bests across the board in fall conditioning and transitioned to pitching with glasses.
Wicklander is also pitching with an insulin pump injected into his thigh or abdomen, as well as a sensor located on his belly. From the mound the pump might look like a small cell phone inside his right back pocket. “I can sit here and tell you proudly that it’s been a real blessing for me,” Wicklander said.
Hobbs said he has seen a more focused pitcher since Wicklander returned to campus last summer.
“Not that he was ever wildly unfocused, but this has given him something else he has to account for on a day-to-day basis, in terms of how he takes care of himself,” Hobbs said.
“His work has always been good, but it seems like this has sharpened up his focus a little bit more. He’s really aware of what he needs for his body to make himself feel like he can compete and train. I think he feels like he’s in a better place physically probably than he’s ever been.
“You have to deal with something that not a lot of people do. As far as I know there is no one else on our team who has to deal with this, and he does. So he has to watch what he eats, he has to watch his levels — he’s got to be aware of all these things. That’s not easy to do for anybody, let alone a college athlete who is trying to get better at baseball and manage school, and it just gives him something else to put on his plate. I could see it being very difficult for kids to deal with, and Pat has done a great job with it.”
Wicklander transitioned from the bullpen to the Razorbacks’ Friday starter three weeks ago. He has been the most reliable starter in an inconsistent Arkansas rotation that has struggled to go deep into 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 appearance against Alabama.
Entering his Game 1 start against Texas A&M this weekend, Wicklander has a 2.76 ERA in 29 1/3 innings. He has been better of late, with an ERA of 2.66 in 20 1/3 innings during his 4 outings against SEC teams.
He has also lowered his walks, which were an issue in his first two seasons when he averaged 2.5 and 2.6 walks per nine innings.
This year Wicklander is averaging 1.8 walks per nine innings, and Hobbs called the balls outside the strike zone good misses.
“At Mississippi State I thought he missed really well — a ball or two off the plate or a ball down, or a ball in,” Hobbs said. “He wasn’t missing wildly to the other side or spiking fastballs in the other batter’s box or anything like that with those misses.
“If you walk a couple of guys that way, then that’s an easier thing to deal with. That’s an easier correction.”
Overall, Hobbs said he sees better velocity — Wicklander’s fastball was clocked at 96 mph during his start at Mississippi State, and is consistently 90-94 mph — and a sharper breaking ball.
“He’s been very good at being able to give us consistency, in terms of what we can expect from his stuff,” Hobbs said.
Wicklander is just happy to be pitching. When he stepped onto the mound for the first time in fall practice, he said he felt like a pitcher returning from Tommy John surgery.
“It’s also given me a new outlook on life,” Wicklander said. “I almost couldn’t be here right now.
“I’m beyond grateful.”