The Herald’s 2025 Baseball Pitcher of the Year: Tanner Requa

STANWOOD — In a tense matchup against Edmonds-Woodway in the District 1 3A semifinals on May 13, Tanner Requa needed a moment.

The Stanwood pitcher was heated. Walking off the field between innings, Requa told Spartans coach Matt Brennan about chirps he was hearing from the Edmonds-Woodway dugout, directed towards him specifically.

Brennan knows his pitcher. He knows that Requa plays with his heart, and sometimes it can affect his head. With Stanwood up to bat, Brennan refused to walk out to his spot coaching from third base until Requa channeled his energy positively.

“I said whatever I could,” Brennan said, offering to handle the extracurriculars as long as Requa focused on the game. “I’ll put out the fire for you, but he knew that he had to take a breath.”

Requa settled back in, and helped Stanwood win 2-1 to advance to the championship game. Stepping up in big moments all season, the junior finished with a 0.91 ERA, 0.86 WHIP and 62 strikeouts over 61.1 innings to earn Wesco North MVP as well as The Herald’s All-Area Baseball Pitcher of the Year.

Requa comes from a wrestling family — his father, Marcus, coaches girls wrestling at Stanwood and his older brother, Braedon, wrestled and played baseball for the Spartans as well — so toughness was preached to him since childhood. Striving to be as good as his brother, Requa took on a mindset of domination every time he stepped on the mound, even before he was actually able to put up the dominant numbers.

“(Braedon) helped me gain the mindset of, you know, everyone that steps in that batter’s box, I’m better than them,” Requa said. “Just having the confidence of thinking you’re the best on the field, no matter what field you step on.”

Pretty soon, the results started to live up to the confidence. Between his freshman and sophomore year, Requa added eight miles per hour to his velocity, and as a junior he started to improve on the mental part of his game.

Requa wore his emotions on his sleeve, including the wrong ones, according to Brennan. Bad at-bats would sit with him. He could sometimes get away with it while playing in the infield, but not when he took the mound. So Brennan challenged him going into 2025.

“He knew that his job was probably the most important out there,” Brennan said. “He had to do what the other guys didn’t think he could. He had to amaze them with his stamina, with his constant positive attitude, even when it seemed impossible.”

Requa took that challenge and ran with it. He tossed five complete games this season, three of them shutouts. His highlight performance was throwing a no-hitter against Edmonds-Woodway on April 4, and in the state regional round against Enumclaw, he lasted 8.2 innings in a narrow 2-1 defeat. When the team needed him to dig deep, he picked up the shovel. Brennan joked that the relief pitchers would resign themselves to the idea that they might only get one-third of an inning whenever Requa started on the mound.

Requa, like any pitcher, tries to get ahead in counts, but the real key for his stamina is not being afraid to pitch to contact. Even during his no-hitter against Edmonds-Woodway, the coaching staff didn’t realize he had one until the final couple of outs of the game with how often the ball was played into the defense.

Brennan calls him a “true pitcher” in an era where so many kids are solely focused on velocity and avoiding contact.

“That’s where a lot of people go wrong,” Requa said. “Sometimes I do make that mistake and try that, but I try to just throw strikes, and then if they put it in play, I trust my defense.”

In addition to pitching, Requa put up big at-bats at the plate and played solid defense at second base, but he prefers pitching because he likes the control. With the passion and emotion he plays with, he wants to be the one with the ball in his hands rather than waiting for a ball to roll towards him in the infield.

In the district semifinal matchup against Edmonds-Woodway, he had to regain that control. The Warriors were “brutal” to him in the dugout both during the no-hitter earlier in the season and the playoff game, according to Requa. After getting a hit off of him early in the game, the crowd reaction was the loudest he had heard all season.

Rather than letting it get to him, as it might have earlier in his career, Requa reminded himself that it took the Warriors a collective 10.1 innings just to get a single hit off of him. He stuck with the same mentality that brought him success from the very beginning, and ultimately got it done.

“I just continued with the mindset of ‘I’m better than them,’” Requa said. “Because I proved that I was.”