Steven Brault is ready to make beautiful music, on the mound and on Broadway

Professional two-sport athletes are rare but Steven Brault is looking to break ground, pitching in the majors and maybe singing on Broadway.

Steven Brault, triple-threat — singer, actor and pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates — has a message he likes to tell anyone he can.

“I wanted to try everything and find out what it was that I could be passionate about,” Brault said in a phone interview earlier this month. “Because I think passion comes from having a natural talent for something mixed with also actually enjoying it.”

The result has been a life with twin passions-turned-professions that aren’t just uncommon — Brault laughed when it was pointed out that “Broadway performer” is seldom a fallback job outcome, even though it is the one he plans to pursue to the fullest only once his baseball career is complete — and an arc that isn’t common in either of the two disciplines.

But that also made Brault a perfect candidate for 2020, the year where linear time appeared to disintegrate altogether. It should surprise no one that he’s taken what has been a difficult moment for those in both baseball and the performing arts, and taken significant leaps forward on both fronts.

Let’s start with what this year was supposed to be. Brault intended to compete for a spot in the Pittsburgh starting rotation, and he had an album set to be released in April. It’s important that you understand: Brault isn’t a baseball player who sings. He is very much a singer — steeped in performing from when he caught the bug doing Peter Pan Junior Theater shows as a fifth grader growing up in San Diego — who’d be well on his way to a musical career if an ability to throw strikes hadn’t kept on developing.

Here, don’t take my word for it. Take a listen.

We’re a Hamilton family, so we hold King George III’s signature song to a very high standard. And Brault’s version of this is on repeat in our home. And not just because it’s on the only album ever made with both Broadway star Adam Pascal and Pirates first baseman Josh Bell on it.

So while the planned release of his album, “A Pitch At Broadway”, came this past April with far fewer live appearances than Brault expected as we all adjusted to a new reality, Brault found a new pathway. He recorded music, virtually, with the cast of “Hadestown”. He received a window into an alternate life, one in which his baseball talent didn’t delay his performing career, and a possible jumpstart into the life he plans to lead when he finishes playing baseball.

“I don’t know when baseball will end or what I’ll do afterward. But having Broadway connections is not a bad thing,” Brault said dryly.

Brault’s ability to respond to unprecedented circumstances has been a recurring theme within his life. When he visited Division II Regis University, his eventual college choice, his baseball coach and the director of the school’s music program met to map out a schedule that would allow him to pursue both in college.

“We sat down and worked out how it was all going to happen,” Brault said. “I was going to have to miss baseball practices for music rehearsals. I was going to have to miss music rehearsals for baseball games. And I would have to miss baseball games or music performances if it came to that. Sure. And that was kind of the hierarchy of it.”

But then the hierarchy of it in Brault’s life changed. He planned to play baseball and then begin his music career. But you can’t hide four-pitch lefties who hit 90 in college, even in Division II, and the Baltimore Orioles drafted him in the eleventh round of the 2013 draft, before sending him to the Pirates in a 2015 trade for Travis Snider.

Brault pitched in parts of four seasons with the Pirates from 2016-2019, registering a 4.88 ERA mostly as a starter, but he revamped his approach in 2020. He’d always been a four-pitch operator — fastball, slider, changeup and occasional curve — but he reduced the fastball diet for hitters significantly, from 64.4 percent in 2019 to 50.7 percent in 2020, and doubled the percentage of changeups he was throwing in the process, from 13.9 percent in 2019 to 24.3 percent in 2020.

“It’s a pitch that looks like a fastball, right? So as dumb as that sounds, it doesn’t need to be the best change in the world in order to be effective,” Brault said. “And for some reason, I have a pretty easy time throwing it for strikes, more so than my slider.”

Brault’s said his willingness to trust his changeup — and to simply throw what his catcher, Jacob Stallings, called for — paid dividends, with success that only built as the truncated season went on. He finished with a 3.38 ERA overall, but his two best starts came in his final two outings of the season. He pitched a complete game to beat the Cardinals on Sep. 16, and followed that with seven shutout innings to defeat the Cubs on Sep. 21.

In September, Brault threw his changeup 26.45 percent of the time. Not one batter managed to get a hit against it.

The very nature of the 2020 baseball season, though, denied Brault a chance to do what so many other pitchers who figure it out in-season manage to experience. Those were his tenth and eleventh starts of the season. A typical 162-game slate would have given him another 20 starts or so to prove he’d finally figured out a pathway to sustained success. Instead, he’ll be one of seven potential starters next year in Pittsburgh, and he said the Pirates didn’t guarantee him anything in his exit interview.

But Brault chose optimism over frustration. He thinks the extra time he got to spend on his art helped his baseball, too — “I’ve always felt if you focused too intently on one thing, you never see the bigger picture” — and even the early ending to the season has its upsides.

“I try to keep a positive outlook of, I got to end the season on a high note,” Brault said. “And for me, I hadn’t done that in the big leagues as of yet. So that was my first time going into the offseason feeling good about what I was able to do during the season and feeling like I was better at the end of the season… And it made going into the offseason for me exciting, in a way where like, I can’t wait to take a break here and then get back to work.”

It’s Steven Brault, though, so “take a break” is a relative term. He’s the kind of baseball junkie, he says, who turns on the late game in San Diego after the Pirates postgame media obligations are over. He’s lost, for now, the outlet of hitting a karaoke bar and shocking the patrons with his voice — an experience he compared to a pitcher getting a base hit. Incidentally, Brault does plenty of that, too, with a .265 batting average in 93 MLB plate appearances. It was another thing 2020 took from him, with the National League adopting the designated hitter.

But he’s back home in California now, and that means working on his crafts — pitching, and safely gathering with a few close friends to sing and maximize the moments before the next baseball season begins. He’s back to singing daily, he said, recording himself on his laptop and then critiquing the results. And he’s trying to teach himself piano.

And yes, to reminisce a bit, too, about this unlikely year for everyone, but especially for Steven Brault. To picture himself back on the vaunted stage of Heinz Hall with the Pittsburgh Symphony. To remember what it felt like when the Cardinals were flailing at his pitches.

And to picture a quiet moment with one of Brault’s musical heroes, Adam Pascal, one of many performers who made Brault feel welcome in his other, parallel world, the one waiting for him when baseball is past, breaking through that barrier thanks to this crazy, mixed-up 2020 reality.

“After we did the recording together, we talked in the studio for a while, and he was just really nice and super interesting to talk to,” Brault said. “But then he asked things like, ‘So when are you going to be on Broadway?’ And I’m like, dude, I don’t know. But it’s really nice of you to ask.”