PEORIA, Ariz. — A year ago, Paul Sewald eased out of the driveway of his home in Las Vegas and pointed his car in the direction of the great unknown.
That’s not entirely true. Sewald was actually heading somewhere precise: Peoria, Ariz., the home of the Mariners’ spring training facility. But in many ways, this particular journey just felt different for him.
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Maybe that was because, for the first time in a long time, Sewald felt something that had largely been absent during his professional career, including four seasons playing for the Mets: Hope.
It may have been the smallest morsel at that point, and barely recognizable, yet it was there.
“I always thought I had the potential to be as good as I was last year (2021), but my four years in New York … we didn’t really see it,” Sewald said recently, eating a sandwich outside an eatery in Peoria.
“I started thinking that maybe I just had this unrealistic expectation of how good I actually was. Like, ‘what if I wasn’t a big leaguer after all?’”
Winding down Highway 93 on his nearly five-hour drive to Peoria last spring, Sewald had a lot of time to think. He was two months shy of his 31st birthday, and his wife, Molly, was pregnant with the couple’s first child. He wondered, fairly: Is this it for me?
Sewald’s professional career, which began in the summer of 2012, had taken all sorts of twists and turns. It eventually carried him to the big leagues, where he posted a 4.75 ERA over parts of four seasons (2017-2020), a time that was largely spent looking over his shoulder.
“Every day, it felt like I was going to get sent down. I know I’ve driven her (Molly) crazy, stressing about it, because it’s her life as much as it is my life at this point,” Sewald admitted. “We drove ourselves mad with this stuff and it got me nowhere. It didn’t make it easier or more fun. It was just exhausting.”
When Sewald arrived in Peoria last spring, he was on a minor-league contract that came with no guarantees. Yet hope persisted because he’d escaped New York and was determined to give the game at least one final chance. He owed himself that much, even though he was aware the odds of him finally finding his stride at age 30 were likely remote.
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“We were very excited to get a new opportunity somewhere else,” Sewald told The Athletic recently. “… I was really excited to have new people looking at me.”
Baseball is a wonderful game for any number of reasons, though the non-linear path it takes some to get to the big leagues (if they get there at all) might just be one of the best. Everyone has a journey, a story. And let’s face it, some are steeped in heartache and disappointment, a path paved with tears. But others are filled with stories of perseverance, and, occasionally, happy endings.
Despite not making the Mariners’ Opening Day roster for 2021, Sewald got an opportunity to make a mark in Seattle and ran — no, sprinted — with it.
A pointed conversation, a revamped way of attacking hitters and, eventually, opportunity intersected to give Sewald the summer of a lifetime, as he became one of baseball’s top relievers (and best stories), posting a 3.34 ERA with 104 strikeouts in 62 2/3 innings.
Sewald’s success was as big as any reason why the plucky Mariners surprised the baseball world by winning 90 games a year ago. If it had not all happened to him, sustained success on the game’s biggest stage, Sewald may not have believed it actually happened.
“Invincible is too strong a word, but there was a stretch there where it sort of felt that way,” he said. “After a while, I really felt like that when I went out there, I was going to put up a zero. I wasn’t even worried anyone was going to get on base.
“That was a good feeling, and one I had never had in the major leagues before.”
Sewald, a Las Vegas native, is the son of two accountants, Mark and Judi. He studied accounting when he got to the University of San Diego, where he was a teammate of another Las Vegas native, good friend Kris Bryant. If numbers were in his blood, so too was pitching. Mark Sewald was a 16th-round draft pick of the Red Sox in 1979. But he bypassed signing a contract to pitch at Loyola Marymount before joining the workforce.
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Paul Sewald was drafted by the Mets in the 10th round of the 2012 draft out of college. He was 26 by the time he first reached Triple A in 2016 and then made his big league debut the next season with the Mets, going 0-6 with a 4.55 ERA in 57 games.
Sewald had a 2.32 ERA in the minors but his stints in the majors were often short and unsuccessful. Eventually, Sewald found himself getting passed over for promotions to the big-league team despite a run of success in the minors.
“You just kept thinking every time someone gets called up, surely it’s going to be him this time,” Molly Sewald said. “And then I remember the devastation after every game when someone else got called up. At the end of the season, he’d said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m a lot older than some of these guys and I’m not getting the opportunities that I thought I deserved.’”
Sewald began to wonder if he should be doing something else, like maybe this was all some sort of sign.
“You are running out there knowing you’re going to get optioned after the game,” Sewald said of his time with the Mets. “It’s very difficult to pitch well in that situation. It’s a numbers thing, they told me. Which was like the 10th time I heard that. I mean, how many times can it be a numbers thing?”
But Molly Sewald reeled him back in quickly. She asked her husband point-blank what he’d rather be doing if he wasn’t playing baseball. He didn’t have an answer.
“I told him to just keep playing, to give it one more year. I asked him, ‘Do you have something in mind that you’d rather do?’ He would say, ‘No, I love playing baseball, I just hate the situation I’m in.’ I told him I can afford to help us with the bills and all of that but he should keep playing,” said Molly, who worked as a civil engineer.
It’s a good thing he did, though Sewald didn’t exactly hit the ground running with the Mariners. First, there was the meeting that changed everything.
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The Mariners, who have a strong analytical department that along with the pitching brass has helped a handful of players get better, sat down and watched video of Sewald with the Mets. They had some ideas of how he could do things differently.
Pitching coach Pete Woodworth, bullpen coach Trent Blank and director of analytics Joel Firman sat Sewald down in Peoria and laid out the two things they felt he needed to do to become a successful pitcher in the big leagues: use his fastball at the top of the strike zone and scrap his depth-heavy slider, instead moving to one that had more horizontal sweep to it.
“If you can do this, we can get you back to where you want to be and you can be successful,” Woodworth said. “And so he kind of flipped his mentality. We didn’t give him new pitches. There wasn’t even really any secret to it. He just changed his mentality and how he was targeting and attacking guys.”
All these changes made sense, but they didn’t all click right away. Let’s just say the practical application got a little bit, well, bumpy.
“It didn’t go very well,” said Sewald, who can laugh about this now. “I got hit around pretty hard last year in camp. My stuff was good but I was not getting the ball up enough. I was throwing the ball down the middle and it was getting whacked pretty good.
“I’d strike out the first guy, give up a homer and then strike out the next guy. I had like a 24 percent strikeout rate, but like a 40.00 ERA. I didn’t really know what I was doing out there.”
But as the saying goes, all big things come from small beginnings.
“I decided I was going to stick with what I was doing, because it was obvious what I was doing in New York wasn’t good enough,” Sewald said. “It didn’t click until I got to the alt site. One day I got the ball up in the zone and that was it. I went to Triple A for a week and was striking out everybody. I had never done that before … so I just kind of ran with it.”
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Sewald reported to the Mariners’ alternate site — Seattle’s T-Mobile Park — where he got to face hitters. He then headed to Triple-A Tacoma to start the season. He began seeing some stunning results. He struck out 10 batters in 4 1/3 innings in Tacoma.
“It was incredible. I pounded the top of the strike zone like 20 times in a row, and guys are swinging through it like I was throwing 140 mph. I was almost in shock. I had never blown it by guys like that before. It was like, ‘OK, this seems to be working really well,’” Sewald said.
The thought of this makes Woodworth smile.
“That’s what made it so gratifying because he was so bad in spring training,” Woodworth said. “A week or two into it, it was like everything just clicked. He just started punching all of those guys out.”
The first six weeks of the big-league season in 2021 for the Mariners were, essentially, a countdown as to when the club would bring up its top two prospects — outfielder Jarred Kelenic and starting pitcher Logan Gilbert. They were knocking on the door hard while in Triple A.
On May 13, the Mariners, who were scuffling along at 18-19 with an offense that had been no-hit twice with an injury-ravaged rotation to boot, added Kelenic and Gilbert to the roster before a series at home against Cleveland. It was a big moment for the organization, graduating two of its top young prospects to the big leagues.
As it turns out, there was a third wheel on the fun bus from Tacoma: A 30-year-old relief pitcher who few in Seattle had heard of.
“It was cool. There was so much buzz there, and I just got to hop on the train,” Sewald said. “No one is here to see me. There’s no pressure for me. These fans don’t know me.
“This was their (Kelenic and Gilbert) debut. For me, it was just another big-league game. Everything was going well, so I figured I would be fine.”
But first, a moment of levity. With some help from Molly — “she’s my social media consultant,” Sewald jokes — he fired off a tweet before he headed up I-5 to T-Mobile Park.
Looks like the @Mariners are calling up their young and spry prospects from AAA! Can’t wait to see you all @TMobilePark tonight #SeaUsRise
— Paul Sewald (@ItsPaulSewald) May 13, 2021
“A lot of the credit goes to Molly,” Sewald said. “I had the idea … and I wanted to say something about how old I was. So we came up with that. She’s the brains.”
Sewald finally got in a game three days later against Cleveland on a bullpen day. He faced nine hitters, struck out four and earned the victory. He got nine called strikes and five swinging strikes. The changes he made worked at the alternate site, and now they were working in the big leagues.
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Sewald, who was out of minor league options at this point, knew he’d likely get an extended look in Seattle — though maybe not quite to the extent that it played out. But he backed up good outing after good outing.
“I didn’t have to look over my shoulder. I think that was the biggest thing, the security. I hadn’t felt like that in three, four years,” he said.
There was one particular sequence in that first outing that still resonates with Sewald. It felt like an a-ha moment for him, as the second batter he faced — José Ramírez — stepped into the box. Emboldened by the changes he made, Sewald went into attack mode.
“Backdoor slider, perfect strike. Another backdoor slider, perfect strike and then a fastball right above the zone that blew his doors away,” Sewald said, smiling. “I was like, ‘this is José Ramírez. This isn’t someone at the alt site. This is (an) All-Star, this is someone who is feared in the league.’”
Sewald wouldn’t wish his struggles — on the mound, or the internal battle he fought — on anyone. But his journey is his journey, and he’s so much more emboldened by it now than ever before. The lessons he’s learned on this path are about more than baseball.
“I think if you are chasing something that you love so much, and you’re so passionate about it, it makes it easier to continue on. And Paul definitely has that passion for baseball,” said Molly Sewald, who met Paul in 2014 when she was attending Arizona State University and he was pitching in the Arizona Fall League. They were married in December 2017.
“He’s definitely gotten knocked down, but I think he just remembered how much he loves the game and there was nothing else he’d rather be doing. The culmination of all these years, to be here with some security. It’s nice.”
In all honestly, Sewald’s perspective started to shift before he landed in the Mariners’ bullpen last May. He knew he was going to be a dad — which made everything else, like not making the team out of spring training, a little more palatable. When daughter Chloe arrived on Aug. 12, his 2021 got infinitely better.
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“It’s such a nice distraction where when I’m at the field, I’m a baseball player, but away from it I’m a dad,” Sewald said. “I think that worked for me last year. I don’t see why it wouldn’t this year. I can throw away the bad outings and come home and be a dad.”
This spring, the Sewalds caravanned from Las Vegas to Peoria. Two cars, Chloe and Charlie, the family’s Australian Shepard. A year ago, Sewald spent that drive wondering what was in front of him, anxious yet hopeful. This spring felt much different. The couple stopped along the drive in Kingman, Ariz., and had a picnic with Chloe and Charlie. Life is good.
“We’re so thankful for spring training where I don’t have to worry about anything,” Sewald said. “It still feels surreal. All I have to do is get ready. I don’t have to worry about results, or Jerry (Dipoto) watching me pitch … was this a good outing, was this a bad outing? They’re confident in me. I’m ready to go.”
As for following the family into accounting, well, that’s just not in the cards anymore.
“I mean, I probably still can,” Sewald said, smiling. “But I’m not going to … ever. No matter what. It’s crazy I almost went down that path.”
At long last, Sewald finally feels like he’s on solid ground.
“The current plan seems to be working out very well for the Sewalds,” he said.
(Top photo: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)