Tyler Becomes Top ‘Dog For Georgia

Scott Stricklin knew the question needed asking. The Georgia head coach had watched his ace, junior Robert Tyler, get hit hard in his previous two starts, and now the Bulldogs were faced with a Thursday night series opener on the road against Florida. Would Tyler be willing to move back in the rotation, rather than start on one less day of rest?

“To be honest with you,” Stricklin said. “We were hoping to get the response that we got.”

That response? No way. No way would Tyler let pass the chance to pitch against the Gators’ A.J. Puk, a friend and former teammate from USA Baseball’s Collegiate National Team. No way would he leave it to someone else to start the series opener against what was the No. 2 team in the country at the time, with the Bulldogs fighting for their postseason lives.

All right, Stricklin thought to himself, this guy’s got a little chip on his shoulder now. The coaches did let him make that April 21 start in Gainesville, and Tyler more than backed them up, holding the talent-laden Gators to one run in 8 1/3 innings while striking out nine in a game the Bulldogs eventually won 2-1 in extra innings.

“He wanted the ball on that Thursday night to go head to head with Puk,” Stricklin said. “He knew that there would be a lot of people there to see it, and he wanted that challenge. And then he just stepped up against arguably the best lineup in the country. He was very, very good. He commanded his fastball. His changeup was a plus-plus pitch, and he threw his breaking ball for a strike.”

That last point was the key. Tyler spent the first two years of his career searching for a consistent breaking ball. At the behest of Bulldogs pitching coach Fred Corral, Tyler began working with a knuckle curveball last fall, a breaking pitch Corral believed to be better suited for his arm action, as it would allow him to stay behind the ball as he does his fastball. The quality of Tyler’s knuckle curve can still vary from day to day, but it was no coincidence that in the Florida game, it was the best, most consistent it’d been all spring.

“I think the biggest thing for me is just my breaking ball,” Tyler said. “Whenever I’m throwing it for strikes, it’s huge for me because I can throw it to righties and lefties. They pretty much know that I have fastball and changeup command, but then whenever I have my breaking ball too, that just does a lot for me.”

The knuckle curve still isn’t a true strikeout pitch, although he did get a couple whiffs on it against Florida. Its real value comes in setting up elevated fastballs. In the past, hitters had an easier time recognizing the high heater out of Tyler’s hand and laying off. Not so anymore.

“As a young freshman and even in his sophomore year, when he threw his fastball, no one would chase that elevated fastball,” Corral said. “So by having this breaking ball that has some depth to it, now you’ve got to as a hitter respect that area—to recognize that it’s either a curveball or a fastball. So he’s getting a lot of swings on that fastball when it’s basically a cross-count fastball where you’d normally throw a breaking ball and it’s that elevated fastball that they just can’t get to.”

Valuable as the improved breaking pitch is, Tyler’s bread and butter remains his fastball and changeup. The 6-foot-4 righthander’s strength and long levers allow him to generate big velocity with a minimum of effort. He hit 99 mph in the first inning against Florida—Corral believes he has it within him to throw triple digits—and was still at 94-96 with his final three pitches of the game, pitch Nos. 113, 114 and 115.

At the same time, the Bulldogs are, as Corral calls them, a BP fastball team. That is, they stress that pitchers don’t have to throw every pitch with maximum effort. Tyler can throw 98 when he wants, sure, but it’s okay to throw 92. The same applies to his knockout changeup, which he can throw in the mid-80s or back off into the high 70s.

“Robert literally can throw a fastball at 98, 92, 88, throw a changeup at 86, 84, and as low as 78,” Corral said. “So hitters have to sit up there, before they see his breaking pitch, they have to guess from 98 to 78, and that’s a very beautiful thing. I think that’s where he’s really going to show some things at the next level.”

Facing a heavily lefthanded lineup against Alabama on April 1, Tyler used the fastball and changeup almost exclusively. That was more than enough. Tyler baffled the Crimson Tide, carrying a perfect game into the seventh and a no-hitter into the ninth before a pinch-hit home run by Georgie Salem with two outs spoiled the bid. That performance came on the heels of Tyler’s throwing six no-hit innings at Mississippi State the week prior, a game he had to be pulled from for pitch count reasons. In all, he threw 14 2/3 no-hit innings between those two games before the Salem homer, a stretch Corral called “as good as I’ve been fortunate to be around in the 20 years I’ve done this.”

Tyler had missed two months during his sophomore season with a forearm strain, but he wasted no time reasserting himself by striking out a career high 13 in just five innings against Georgia Southern on Opening Day this February. The Florida game dropped Tyler’s ERA to 2.53 after his first 10 starts of 2016, and he’d racked up 71 strikeouts in 57 innings, although a rough outing against Vanderbilt on April 29 ballooned the ERA up to 3.34 and left his record at 3-4.

Tyler originally committed to the previous Georgia coaching staff headed up by David Perno. When Stricklin got the job in June 2013, just a few days before the draft, one of his first orders of business was to call Tyler.

“’Strick’ was like the first one to call me (after the coaching change),” Tyler said, “and he really said that they needed me here, so that really got me excited to come and play.”

Tyler grew up a Georgia fan, hailing from the small town of Cordele in South Georgia, and expected he’d wind up in Athens, barring a team meeting his bonus demands out of high school. His name wasn’t called until the 28th round that June, when the Orioles took a shot at him—and they were serious about signing him.

Tyler’s soft spoken by nature, but there’s no lack of confidence either. When push came to shove, he was willing to bet on himself.

“The Orioles made a run at him,” Stricklin said. “They tried to see if he would be interested in signing. So he had another decision to make there at the end—is he going to sign right before the deadline? The thing that he said to coach Corral was, ‘On the back of my baseball card, I want it to say No. 1, not No. 28. I want to be a first-rounder.’ ”

Keep on the path he’s followed at Georgia, and Tyler should find himself on plenty of baseball cards. And they’ll have a No. 1 on the back.

“He’s got a huge ceiling,” Stricklin said. “When you watch him throw, it just looks so easy. There’s not a whole lot of effort to it. He throws a pitch and you look up on the scoreboard and all of a sudden you see a 97, and it just doesn’t register. How is that possible? Because it looked like he just lobbed it in there. . . . But adding that third pitch to the repertoire is something I think takes him from being maybe a third or fourth starter in the big leagues to being a one or a two. I think that breaking ball can take him to that level.”