A baseball season beckons, and Chad and Amanda Kuhl can’t help but be stirred by its allure.

For the 31-year-old Middletown natives, it represents a treasured return to normalcy after a challenging 2023.

Chad Kuhl will be back on the pitcher’s mound, where he has spent seven big-league seasons.

Amanda, his wife and childhood sweetheart, will be off chemotherapy and radiation, the twin assailants of her breast cancer. Those doses ended in the fall. She was diagnosed in January of 2023 and underwent a double mastectomy in February.

Her cancer treatment and Chad’s desire to be by Amanda’s side through the recovery led him to turn down offers to continue pitching following his June release by the Washington Nationals.

After an odd summer without throwing the baseball in competition, Chad Kuhl is poised to fling it again toward batters.

He and Amanda will travel to Arizona in February with 2-year-old son Hudson to the spring-training camp of the Chicago White Sox, who recently signed Kuhl to a minor league deal.

“So it begins,” said Kuhl, the former Middletown High and University of Delaware standout. “We’re excited for another year. We’re excited for a full year.”

Teaming up in cancer fight

The Washington Nationals turned their Mother’s Day game last May 14 against the Mets into a fundraiser for the “Cancer Isn’t Kuhl” campaign, launched by Amanda and Chad to aid cancer charities.

“I knew that my hair was falling out,” Amanda said. “I knew that I would probably be shaving my head that day.”

But that was a minor inconvenience compared with the overall challenge of coping with cancer.

Amanda was treated at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington with her and Chad residing in nearby McLean, Virginia. She quickly learned she was not alone, that plenty of others and their families, including some in baseball, were also battling cancer’s sinister intent.

That’s why she partnered initially with the Previvor and Breast Care Washington DC and, more recently, the Delaware Breast Cancer Coalition and the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

“It’s what got me through,” she said, “knowing that I was doing something good with this crap hand I was dealt.”

Community service and efforts on behalf of others were “so deeply rooted in my persona,” said Amanda. Before she married Chad, Amanda Debus was Miss Teen Delaware in 2008, won the Miss Delaware pageant in 2016 and competed in the 2017 Miss America. She is now co-executive director of Miss Delaware.

“It shows the kind person she is,” Chad said.

Amanda has also shared her journey through her @realmrskuhl account on Instagram.

"She's so independent," Wendy Kuhl, Chad's mother, said. "She's so secure In herself. We could not be more proud of her determination. I feel like she had cancer, but cancer never had her."

Pitching wasn't the priority

Chad Kuhl went to baseball games last year, as a fan.

“It was a summer I never had before,” he said.

He, Amanda and Hudson attended a Nationals game after he was cut. They went to a Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park, where Chad recalled once warming up for a start with only people who knew him lining the concourse above the bullpen in center field. On the mound, he could recognize the voices of familiar fans when they shouted encouragement.

They went to Camden Yards to see friend and 2022 Colorado teammate Kyle Freeland pitch for the Rockies against the Orioles. Along the way, he was pleased to learn that Hudson “was just enthralled” with baseball.

Kuhl was released by Washington after giving up four runs in one inning of work in a loss at San Diego. There were other teams interested in signing him, he said, though not those nearby.

He decided, instead, the best option was staying with Amanda.

“I just didn’t think it was very fair to leave her in a city by herself and for me to continue to do my thing,” he said.

“I had a couple offers. Moves were being made and spots became available. I could have joined a few teams and kinda smoothly kept the season going, but I wouldn’t have been in D.C. and not in that [National League East] division either.”

The most important thing, he said, was for Amanda to continue the care she was getting, where she was getting it.

“I just felt like a three-month pause was going to be worth it,” he added. “I felt like it was the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do would be to leave and have her handle it all by herself.”

He and Amanda also benefitted from the proximity of family in Delaware, with their parents – Mary and Matt Debus and Wendy and Clint Kuhl – just a two-hour drive away.

"I could not have been more proud of him when he made that decision," Wendy Kuhl said. "I'm sure he thought about it before he did it. But I'm sure he didn't have to think long because, for Chad, family always comes first."

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Kuhl continued to stay physically fit and “keep my arm moving, though I was doing a bare minimum of throwing,” he said.

He began to pitch again in the fall with Nationals bullpen catcher Brandon Snyder at a training facility he has in Manassas, Virginia, then continued back home in Delaware at Slim’s Sports Complex in Middletown, Goldey-Beacom College and UD.

“I’m hopefully nowhere near done,” he said.

At 30, a lesson about breast cancer

Women have a 1-in-8 chance of getting breast cancer, according to the American Cancer Society, which puts in No. 2 behind lung cancer as the disease’s leading cause of death.

The rate of diagnoses increases with age. Amanda learned she had breast cancer when she was 30, an age at which just 0.49% of women are diagnosed.

“I wanted to share my story,” she said of going public with her cancer last spring, “because I didn’t know many 30-year-olds that were being diagnosed. I thought, like most people my age, mammograms are for 50-year-olds, that breast cancer is for 50-year-olds.”

The disease does not, however, discriminate, and Amanda had a lump discovered during a visit to her gynecologist.

Her treatment has been effective and now involves daily oral medication and monthly injections, though her doctors prefer not to say she is in remission. Breast cancer, she suggested, does not give up easily.

“My care team, they’re very sure we’re doing everything we can to keep it from recurring,” said Amanda, who has also successfully coped with a case of deep vein thrombosis in which a blood clot traveled to her heart.

Nonetheless, her diagnosis and the perilous possibilities that come with it led Amanda to contemplate her fate.

“If anything took a turn, I needed something good to come out of my legacy,” she said, “because you never know what’s gonna happen with breast cancer. I wasn’t put on this Earth just to wallow in my own pity.”

Next stop, White Sox

The White Sox were among the teams showing the most interest in Kuhl before he signed as a free agent last year with Washington, which made them a logical option this year.

“It’s a nice opportunity,” Kuhl said of joining the pitching-needy White Sox. “It’s a minor league deal, and I’ll do big-league spring training. I’ve already been told I’ll most likely be sent to Triple-A Charlotte just to get some starts, just to get some game experience under me and see how it all goes.

“But you never know how spring training is gonna go. I just felt like it made a lot of sense to go there.”

Kuhl was a four-year varsity player at Middletown High, where he was state Player of the Year and first-team All-State at two positions as a senior in 2010. He was 8-2 with a 1.69 ERA and 71 strikeouts in 49⅔ innings. A first baseman when he wasn’t pitching, Kuhl also batted .444 with eight home runs.

He signed with Delaware, where he became the Blue Hens’ No. 3 starter as a freshman. In three UD seasons, Kuhl pitched in 42 games with 37 starts.

Kuhl was 10-2 with a 3.75 ERA with 76 strikeouts in 105⅔ innings, the third most in a season in school history, as a junior in 2013. The Pirates chose him in the 13th round of the 2013 draft and Kuhl signed.

Just three years later, Kuhl made his big-league debut in a nationally televised Sunday night game against the Dodgers and Clayton Kershaw.

In seven big-league seasons – five in Pittsburgh and one each with Colorado and Washington – Kuhl is 31-45 with a 4.98 ERA in 143 games with 116 starts. He has 536 strikeouts in 615 innings.

He missed the 2019 season after undergoing Tommy John surgery on his elbow. This time his wife's health willingly sidelined Kull. He relishes his return.

“You take a break. You miss being out there. You miss being in the clubhouse with the guys," he said. "It makes you realize I hopefully have a lot left.”

Contact Kevin Tresolini at ktresolini@delawareonline.com and follow on Twitter @kevintresolini. Support local journalism by subscribing to delawareonline.com and our DE Game Day newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Chad Kuhl back pitching after helping Amanda Kuhl battle breast cancer