Cincy marks triumphant return for Sewald

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CINCINNATI -- Torey Lovullo checked his text messages Sunday morning and saw he had one from closer Paul Sewald, who -- at the time -- was on the injured list with a strained right oblique.

Sewald had thrown in an extended spring camp game Saturday in Arizona, and the team was waiting to see how he felt Sunday before deciding whether he would be activated for Tuesday’s series opener against the Reds.

Channeling his inner Bill Belichick, Sewald’s text was short and to the point: We’re on to Cincinnati.

Seward strained the oblique the last week of Spring Training, and for the first time in his career, he had to spend time on the injured list. It was not a fun experience.

“I was struggling,” Sewald said. “At first I was watching a lot and then I kind of stopped. It's extremely frustrating.”

There were a lot of four-letter words thrown around when things weren’t going well for the D-backs, leading Sewald’s wife to ask if he was this bad when he was at the ballpark.

“No, I'm way worse,” Sewald told her. “You should see me when I'm in the game. But just feeling like I have some sort of control over it was much better than watching. It's just not really what you want to do. So I haven't watched a lot lately, just looked at the box scores. I can kind of see how the game went based off of that.”

It looked like Sewald might be close to returning a week ago, but after his outing for Triple-A Reno, he reported some soreness. So the team slowed his rehab and he had another MRI, which showed that the oblique had fully healed.

The discomfort Sewald felt was normal, but the last time he felt anything in that area was when he was diagnosed with the strain -- so the concern was understandable.

“I just panicked for a little bit,” Sewald said. “It was mostly just a mental hurdle. The hardest thing is that no one knows what I'm feeling except for me. And I had no symptoms for three weeks and I kind of had something as we're ramping up and my first thought is, 'Well, the last time I had something, I had a torn oblique.'”

While Sewald was out, Lovullo relied on setup man Kevin Ginkel to close out games. The right-hander went 5-for-7 in save opportunities, with a 2.57 ERA.

Now that he’s back, though, the job belongs to Sewald.

“He'll continue to pitch on the back end of the games,” Lovullo said of Ginkel. “We're grateful for what he did. He's an unbelievable teammate, and understanding that the closer is now back in the clubhouse and he's just going to do whatever he can do to help the team win, and I'm really grateful for that. I know he wants to close. I know he did a good job of closing. He'll get the toughest part of the lineup in the seventh or eighth inning and hand it off to Paul.”