When Brandon Williamson was a kid, he broke his left hand while snowboarding. He also hurt the hand when he fell out of a tree when he was young.
“It was just weak,” Williamson said about that hand.
Then in June, as he was ramping up and coming back from a shoulder injury that landed him on the injured list in April, he was doing clapping pushups.
“I had my feet elevated, came up, clapped and went back on my knuckle,” Williamson said. “I came down on it again in the gym and it recracked at the same spot. It was an unfortunate setback. I would have been back at least two weeks sooner.”
It’s been that type of season so far for Williamson. But as he returns from the IL this week, he gets a chance to write a different ending to his season.
Williamson will start for the Reds on Wednesday. Then next Monday, he’ll do a piggyback start with Chase Burns and back up Burns as the Reds manage the All-Star’s innings count.
Williamson should get plenty of innings down the stretch.
“I just want to feel good,” Williamson said. “I want to pitch. I want to test where I’m at. I want to see what I need to do, take that into the offseason and be ready to rock for next year, too.”
No one in the Reds’ rotation had a stronger spring training than Williamson. He literally pitched his way into forcing the Reds’ hand to use a six-man rotation (that plan got scrapped when Nick Lodolo went on the injured list with a blister). Williamson’s velocity was up, he looked like much more of a strikeout pitcher and he changed the way that he sequenced pitches. Williamson more often went “fast-to-slow,” getting ahead with his fastball and using off-speed pitches to finish at-bats with strikeouts.
On April 6, in Williamson’s second start of the season, he threw 6 ⅔ shutout innings against a good Marlins lineup. On April 17, he allowed one run in 5 ⅓ innings in an impressive home-state start against the Twins. Over a three-start stretch, he looked like he was beginning to hit his stride.
“I was in such a groove in spring training,” Williamson said. “I don’t want to say it was easy, but I felt like I knew what I was doing. My arm was flowing. The game was coming easier than it normally does.”
Then, a shoulder issue that has troubled Williamson for a lot of his professional career popped back up. Williamson, who missed nearly all of the 2024 season with a shoulder injury and then missed the entire 2025 season after having Tommy John surgery, went back on the IL with a shoulder injury at the end of April.
“After two years of not pitching, getting back into it, it caught up to me,” Williamson said. “I think we have it behind us now. We’ve done a lot of good stuff in the last few months to negate that.”
Williamson said that his shoulder is checking out well now after months of rehab and training. His biggest changes revolved around his stretching routine, and now he does a lot more to loosen his shoulder before and after he throws.
The hand injury that he suffered doing clapping pushups in June was a setback, but now Williamson is all the way back.
The 28-year-old was the centerpiece of the Jesse Winker/Eugenio Suárez trade with the Mariners in 2022, and Williamson has still only pitched in 33 games with the Reds. Twenty-three of those starts were in 2023, when Williamson saved the rotation and was as consistent as any Reds’ starter during his rookie year.
He has had to adjust to try to better manage his shoulder injury. Now is his opportunity to show that he can put that behind him.