Hardship And Humility: Jake Jewell And The Fight To Re-take The Mound

The Fesmire Field Field House is a loud place. It’s a small area for the entirety of the Union baseball team.  In one cage, the ear-piercing sound of baseballs finding the sweet spot of aluminum rattled the turf room like an echo chamber. Pitchers played catch in the middle, dodging rogue shots from a groundball machine next to them. In the other cage, a monumental milestone was being made.

“Not gonna lie. After that, I’m hosed.” Senior pitcher and physical education major Jake Jewell said, laughing under his breath.

Jewell wiped his brow and ducked under the batting cage where he just finished throwing the first half of a bullpen. He’s thrown twenty-five pitches at 100% effort with live hitters in the cage. He sat down for a moment to catch his breath before digging his foot into the rubber for another twenty-five pitches. Jewell took his right wrist and gently pulled it back, stretching the tight muscles and tendons down his forearm and elbow. He nodded for the first of several hitters to step into the cage.

“I’m good, I’m good,” Jewell said to his hitters.

“I’m ready.”

With the bats sounding like iron hammers and the impact of thrown pitches nearby reminiscent of gunshots, he had to yell for them to be able to hear.

To an outsider’s perspective, Jewell’s bullpen may seem like nothing out of the ordinary. Bullpens are thrown by every pitcher to keep their arm game-ready, their pitch arsenal sharp, and their mental game in focus. But for everyone in the turf room, it was a miracle he was standing tall on that mound to begin with.

Two years prior, Jewell had torn his UCL in his right arm, a devastating injury notorious for putting pitcher’s careers to bed.

“It was October of 2022. That was the first time that I felt something,” Jewell said. “I was throwing in the Fall World Series and I started that game and it was at the very end… After that, I felt something, and I knew it wasn’t normal.”

Jewell described the events following the initial moment of injury as “frustrating.” Over the baseball winter break, Jewell visited a doctor who had given him a number of MRI’s. The doctor downplayed the injury, saying it was nothing more than a pronator strain; ultimately misdiagnosing the clear UCL tear in Jewell’s elbow. During his sophomore spring season, this sent Jewell down a long, strenuous path to recovery on a recovery plan that was useless for this injury. Returning the fall of 2023, his junior year, his arm was still yielding sharp pain, seemingly kicking him back to ground zero once again.

“I went back to the doctor and was trying to get more stuff figured out, and he [the doctor] was like, ‘it might be a little bit of that pronator again, but I think you just have a little bit of nerve inflammation.’”

Jewell was misdiagnosed again. He had had three to four MRI’s by this doctor, and each time, he failed to see the tear in Jewell’s UCL. Eventually, Jewell decided to visit another doctor; and this time, the full extent of his injury was revealed.

It was a clear UCL tear.

“It’s just frustrating,” Jewell said. “All of them were misread. At that point, when he [the new doctor] told me that, the first thing that went through my mind was ‘Well, that’s a 8 to 9 month recovery.’ So there, it’s not even worth it at this point.”

Initially, Jewell’s decision to receive Tommy John surgery didn’t directly come from the attempt to comeback to play ball. In fact, the idea of quitting altogether was tempting.  It came from the daily struggle to accomplish normal everyday tasks like changing gears in the car, shaking hands, and opening doors. With the school covering all the medical expenses as a nice touch, Jewell had Tommy John surgery in June of 2024. The road to recovery benched him for the entirety of the 2024 season.

Instead of wallowing in that brutal reality, Jewell took advantage of the circumstances and played the game from a totally new perspective, a coaching perspective.

“Me being a physical education major, I plan to go into coaching. It [being injured] took me to that coaching perspective and allowed me to view it otherwise,” Jewell said. “It still made me feel like I was a part of it, even when I was wasn’t playing.”

He certainly was a part of it. Even being out with a season ending injury, Jewell never missed practice, lift, or game. Jewell took the jobs that most players hesitate to even consider. During games, Jewell manned pitching and hitting charts, the radar gun, and even covered hitting tendencies or anything that would give his teammates an advantage statistically. Why? Because Jake Jewell isn’t just a good ballplayer.

He’s an even better teammate.

This drive to help the team in an athletically incapable position marks Jewell as unique. It’s easy to wallow in the mire of unfortunate circumstances, especially when you’ve been stripped of your entire purpose on a baseball team. But it’s hard to keep your head down and work your butt off to get back to a position where you can help your teammates on the field, not just in the dugout.

As a catcher who knows his pitchers’ tendencies and individual in-game struggles, mathematics major Matthew Sureda watched this unfold from a completely different perspective.

“The thing that stands out to me about Jake is just how quick he’s been able to come back from Tommy John,” Sureda said. “I think the amount of work he’s put into the weight room and rehab speaks volumes to his dedication to this sport and how badly he wants to be out there with the rest of the team.”

It’s even harder to push through the hardship for not just yourself, but for your brethren. This takes a level of patience and humility that is rarely seen in the baseball world.

“To this day, I’m kinda thankful that I got hurt because I feel like beforehand I was always maybe a little arrogant.” Jewell said. “When it came to baseball, I always thought that I was probably better than I was. I feel like the injury kind of humbled me and made me sit back and watch it all from a different perspective.”

Now Jewell is nearly back to 100%. Pitching to those live hitters has confirmed that he’s almost back. He once was one hair away from pulling the plug on his baseball career. Now Jewell may see the field in as little as a week.