Former D-backs P Brandon Webb on a career cut short, no regrets

Brandon Webb’s baseball career was cut short due to injuries. But he still made the most of the time that he was on the field.

Webb’s 31.1 career WAR, per Baseball Reference, is third-highest in franchise history behind Randy Johnson and Paul Goldschmidt. That’s despite the fact that he pitched only six full big league seasons from 2003 to 2008, plus one game in 2009, before injuries permanently derailed his career. He formally retired in 2013.

But even in his short-lived career, Webb was a three-time All-Star, won the NL Cy Young in 2006 and was a runner-up for the award in each of the next two seasons.

Imagine what he could’ve done with more time?

“Do I have a regret? I have no regrets in the game, for sure,” Webb told Arizona Sports’ Doug & Wolf. “Obviously I wish it would’ve been longer. I was not even close to being ready to be out of the game. But arm injuries took a toll and I couldn’t come back, but I obviously miss the game and wish it would’ve gone a little bit differently. But what I did, I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish in the short amount of time I feel like I was in the big leagues.”

After his shoulder injury with the Diamondbacks in 2009, attempts to comeback would stop and stall. That played a physical and mental toll on Webb as time went on. He signed with the Texas Rangers in 2011, where more effort to return to the big leagues went unrewarded.

“It took a long time. I fought for three years, really, to try to come back,” he said. “Even talking with all the doctors whenever I was going through this and getting all the images and MRIs and scans, everybody’s like, ‘It doesn’t look that bad, you’re going to be fine.’ I always felt like I was going to come back, and then I had my last surgery, my last year was with Texas, trying to come back. I actually was getting really close, and then obviously another setback and another surgery at the end of that year.

“But even after that, I felt good going into that offseason and my throwing program, it felt great. But then getting to that same point that I got to the previous three years, that’s when I was like, ‘I’m done. I’ve gotten to the same place almost every time, this is just not happening.’ That was in 2013, I believe. Again, it’s still hard. Going to working the games with the Diamondbacks, for my first couple years, I’m like, ‘I should be out there playing still!’ But it’s always hard. I’ll always miss it.”

Still, Webb’s baseball career turned out better than some might have expected. He joked that when he was first dating his now-wife, she would brush off his ambition to play Major League Baseball.

“She always laughed at me saying, when I was dating her, she was still in high school, ‘This guy thinks he’s going to play big-league baseball, mom!’ I was like, ‘Yeah, what do you mean? Yeah, that’s just how it’s going to be.’ And she was like, ‘That’s not going to happen, what are you really going to do?’

“So when I went to college [at University of Kentucky], I was studying kinesiology, which I had no idea what that even was, those classes were extremely hard. I was going to be happy and fine — she was going to be an English teacher at the high school there and I was going to be the gym teacher and coach baseball. That was it.”

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