Ben Seiler of the Indiana Hoosiers delivers during the game against the Texas Longhorns at the IU UFCU Disco-Falk Field in Austin, Texas. (Photo By Xavier Daniels/Indiana Athletics)
Twenty years ago, a three-year-old boy and his father played catch in their front yard in Albany, N.Y.
The yard slopes down from the house at the corner of West Lawrence Street and Myrtle Avenue to the sidewalk, and the boy, who had precociously developed the ability to throw accurately with his left hand, would clamber up the hill after a pop fly his dad would toss up, and then he’d roll back down the hill, as three year olds do, regardless of whether he caught the ball.
“Do it again, dad! Another green monster!” Ben Seiler would say, asking for another throw, bestowing upon the small, verdant hill the same nickname of baseball’s most famous wall.
Norman Rockwell could have painted this All-American childhood scene. As for the boy, well, he kept on throwing baseballs. In high school, he threw a perfect game in the state semifinals as a junior and was the small school player of the year as a senior. Seiler played through four years of Division I college baseball at Siena College in Loudonville, New York, and a fifth season with Indiana University.
Standing on the right field foul line at Rocky Miller Park in Evanston, Illinois, Ben Seiler has come a long way from the hill in front of the house on West Lawrence Street in Albany to the green plastic carpet where Indiana University played a weekend series against Northwestern, his dad’s alma mater, in early May.
And like every other college senior, whether they’re a baseball player or not, Seiler knows his life is about to change. Baseball grabbed a hold of Ben Seiler early and has yet to let go, and while there may be more baseball ahead, it’s possible that his next game could see him throw the final pitches of a journey that started years earlier.
‘He throws just as hard as he has to’
“Even as a toddler, he had no interest in blocks, cars, books, much to [his father] Casey’s chagrin,” Rachael Seiler, Ben’s mother and a self-identifying “huge Red Sox fan,” told World Baseball Network. “When he was three years old, he had baseball cards and he understood who the players were. We would review the positions and he would lay out a game on our living room rug with these baseball cards… and he would play a whole game.”
From the living room carpet, Ben moved on to National Little League of Albany, where he made the majors – the top league for kids up to age 13 – as a nine-year-old.
“The fact that he was nine and the rest of the players were 12 and 13 or about to turn 13, that’s something,” Rachael said of when she realized her son might have potential. “And he was competing at or better at that point.”
The little league lefty headed off to the Albany Academy, a private day school in the Capital Region, and then genetics kicked in.
He grew into an intimidating mound presence – not just for a high school pitcher, but for a pitcher at any level. Standing 6-foot-6 and topping 260 pounds, with a fastball in the mid-80s, Ben was already more of a pitcher than a hard thrower. His mom’s family line contains a lot of physical size, and he was the recipient of that genetic gift.
“He throws just as hard as he has to,” his high school coach, Dave Rider, told the Albany Times Union in a 2018 profile. “There are probably five or six times in every game that he pitched where he reared back and threw as hard as he could. He’s more of a pitcher. That is why he can throw as many pitches as he does and come back on short rest. Ben is very efficient. He doesn’t have any extreme movements in his delivery. He is the consummate pitcher, kind of a throwback in a time where everything is about velocity.”
Four years at Siena kept Seiler close to home, playing ball and going to school less than seven miles from the hill where he once chased pop flies, making 29 starts for the Saints over four seasons, posting a 6.00 ERA, but developing as a pitcher enough to draw the notice of scouts.
There probably would have been more starts at Siena had COVID-19 not cut the 2020 season short, but the pandemic also provided Seiler an extra year of eligibility and a decision to make last summer.
There was the possibility of playing another season of college ball, and also some lukewarm interest from a few teams after he went unchosen in the 2022 MLB Draft. What to do?
“I talked to a couple teams after, but I thought it was in my best interest to go to Indiana and pursue my master’s degree and play one more year,” Seiler said.
‘It refocused me’
There are big differences between playing Division I baseball at a small college in the Northeast like Siena and a Big Ten school like Indiana — at Siena, there were long bus rides to play games against schools in the south when the fields in New York’s Capital Region were still covered by snow. This week, the Hoosiers flew to Omaha, Nebraska for the Big Ten Championship by private jet.
Since arriving in Bloomington, he’s worked with Dustin Glant, the Hoosiers pitching coach who reached Triple-A as a player in the Arizona Diamondbacks organization and was the Triple-A pitching coach in the New York Yankees organization for two seasons. Indiana brought Seiler in as a fifth-year player to be a veteran presence, keep the team grounded, and do what he does best — get batters out.
