The old saying in academia for professors just starting out in their careers is “publish or perish”—meaning, in addition to teaching and research duties, one has to constantly produce material demonstrating relevant importance to the scholarly community to justify a position in the hyper-competitive world of academia. The world of being an MLB reliever is similarly defined by “what have you done for me lately”, with relievers constantly needing to adapt to trends that dominate MLB in a limited sample size; punchouts or perish. For relievers who aren’t blessed with a cannon of an arm that can casually hurl triple digits like your grandma firing off holiday delights from a cookie press, that requires attention to the physics of what makes baseballs hard to hit and a PhD where the D stands for “deception.
40 in 40: Paul Sewald is outwitting, outplaying, outlasting
