How An Eye Exam Might Have Saved Brock Wilken’s Career After HBP To The Face
Image credit: Brock Wilken (Photo by Chris Coduto/Getty Images)
In the summer of 2021, I took a job with Perfect Game to cover the Cape Cod Baseball League for the summer. I was looking to make the jump from a career in sales to a full-time position in baseball. I had written at a variety of sites over the years and viewed a summer of covering baseball games and earning some additional income as a fairly solid deal.
It was a fun season in what would be my final months before eventually joining the team here at Baseball America.
Over the course of that summer, the most outstanding player in the league was a 19-year-old infielder who had just finished his freshman season at Wake Forest by the name of Brock Wilken. The future 2023 first-round pick and top 30 Brewers prospect hit .302/.430/.519 in what was likely one of the best seasons in the modern Cape Cod League as an underclassman.
Throughout the summer of 2021, I got to see Wilken’s historic performance first hand. Through a mutual friend, I got connected with him early on in the Cape season and got to know him about as well as a reporter gets to know a player.
Needless to say, when news broke of Wilken being struck in the face by a 94 mph fastball on April 11 2024, I, like many in the baseball world, hoped for the best. Wilken would undergo facial reconstructive surgery to deal with multiple facial fractures.
While Wilken returned to the field less than a month later, the lasting impact of that pitch lasted for months.
The mental hurdles associated with getting back in the box to face live pitching haunted Wilken in the early going, as he struggled to forget the moments leading up to the fateful fastball. Returning to play against the Arizona Complex League Dodgers on May 4, Wilken faced some uncomfortable at bats.
“First at bat, I foul off the first pitch I saw, and it was the exact same pitch I fouled off before I got hit in the face,” Wilken recalled. “Same spot, same pitch. What are the chances?”
Sure enough, Wilken would be hit on the back by a 94 mph fastball—the same pitch and velocity that struck him in the face.
“I was like “Oh, dude you got to be kidding me,'” Wilken said. “I had already been hit a few times during live at bats, and I was pushing through it a little bit you know?”
An even scarier moment came later in the game when he faced righthanded fire-baller Alvaro Benua in what was his very first stateside inning.
“The first pitch out of his hand was 100 mph right over my head,” Wilken said. The next pitch, he recalled geting “a 92 mph slider behind me.”
The next pitch was a slider behind him again. At that point, Wilken realized he needed to get out of there fast.
“I flailed my arms a little bit, and the ball hit my bat,” Wilken said. “At that point I told myself, ‘I’m swinging at the next pitch no matter what. Unless it’s going to hit me.’”
Wilken did, indeed, survive the at bat. He returned to action with Double-A Biloxi on May 7, and he struggled over the course of the 2024 season, hitting .201/.316/.370 with 17 home runs.
He headed to the Arizona Fall League following the season, hitting .155/.260/.310 over 23 games with Peoria. Wilken finished the season and headed home to Florida to his new wife and infant son, looking to recover from a trying season.
“The Fall League was a great experience, but I still wasn’t where I wanted to be,” Wilken said. “I was missing a lot of pitches I hadn’t in years prior.”
Doubt begin to creep in for the first time in Wilken’s baseball life.
“You kind of spiral on yourself,” he said. “You start to think too much about why you’re missing these pitches. You lose confidence. So much of baseball is mental, right? The mental part of the game for me was so far gone.”
It was Wilken’s wife Sara who took an action that might have saved her husband’s career.
“My wife was the driving force behind me finally getting my eyes checked,” Wilken said. “Right when I was coming back from the injury she had suggested it.”
Wilken resisted the idea at first, feeling as though he had no symptoms of worsening eyesight. Sara however, persisted, and she reached out to Wilken’s agent.
This turned out to be sage wisdom.
Tests revealed Wilken had 50th percentile depth perception. Not exactly in-line with the level of vision required to hit a baseball at a high level, it was likely the root cause of Wilken’s struggles in the month following him being struck by that fastball.
“My eyes basically converged,” Wilken said, describing his eyes as having “moved three optometry units inward.”
“When you hold your phone up to your face to read a text better, that’s how the doctor described what my eyes were doing when I was trying to play.”
What followed were three months of eye therapy and rehabilitation seven days a week from December into February of 2025. Wilken would drive an hour from his home to Walesby Vision Center in Land O’ Lakes, Florida for treatment.
“Basically, the training taught my eyes to work independently of each other and then fuse them into one object.” Wilken said. “It’s complex and confusing and, at times, I don’t even know how to fully explain all of the work we did.”
After a season of tribulations, Wilken looks to be back to his old self. On Wednesday, he slugged his 10th home run of the season to go with a .986 OPS. Now 13 months removed from his injury, Wilken is showing improved plate discipline and has found his power stroke as he leads the Southern League in home runs and walks.
Wilken looks to be in the midst of a rebirth that may have never happened had he not gotten his eyes checked.
