Most hip-hop stars don't get their start playing college baseball, but Mike Stud is one MC who used his downtime from the diamond to hone his skills rhyming and rapping. Michael Francis Seander, Jr. was born on October 30, 1988 in Providence, Rhode Island. A talented athlete, Seander lettered in baseball and basketball in high school, and when he graduated from St. Raphael Academy in Pawtucket, he was named Rhode Island's 2006 Gatorade Player of the Year, and received a Louisville Slugger scholarship to attend Duke University. An outstanding pitcher, in his freshman year Seander set a record for the lowest ERA in the history of Duke's baseball program, an impressive 1.61. However, after his second year at Duke, he suffered an arm injury that required surgery, and as he recuperated, he began writing rap lyrics to keep himself occupied. Seander wrote a rap song, "College Humor," about hard partying and his raunchy exploits with women, and recorded a rough version for his friends and teammates using GarageBand. The song went over well enough that in 2010 Seander produced a video for the song and distributed it under the name Mike Stud; "College Humor" racked up over 1.5 million views on YouTube, and Stud's follow-up, "In This Life," featuring a guest appearance by Loggy, fared even better. In October 2011, Stud's first mixtape, A Toast to Tommy, rose to the number two spot on the American iTunes Hip-Hop charts, and his first proper album, Relief, which found him introducing more serious themes along with his bro-centric party dude material, appeared in the spring of 2013. Stud made his major-label debut the following year with Closer, which was released by the Atlantic-distributed 300 Entertainment imprint. Released in July 2014, the album rose to number 13 on the Billboard Top 200, and hit number two on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart. In 2015, Stud followed up Closer with an eight-song EP that featured new material as well as remixes of earlier tracks; it was fittingly titled This Isn't the Album. The album in question arrived in January 2016; These Days included a guest appearance by Marcus Stroman of the Toronto Blue Jays on the title track. Five months later, the Esquire Network debuted the reality series This Is Mike Stud, which followed the rapper at home and on the road as he worked to take his career to the next level. ~ Mark Deming