In the summer of 2015, Kayleigh McEnany was a law student with a growing interest in politics, and she reached out to a rookie pitcher she had never met through social media. That simple connection would quietly shape the rest of her life, though at the time there was no reason to expect it would last. He was a minor league player just beginning his professional career, years away from any kind of recognition, while she was already building the résumé that would carry her into the White House briefing room. His name was Sean Gilmartin, and the path that led him to that moment had started long before, on a pitcher’s mound.

Gilmartin’s talent was evident early. The San Diego Padres drafted him straight out of high school in 2008, a rare honor for a teenager, but he turned down the offer. Instead, he chose to attend Florida State University on a baseball scholarship, betting on himself and his future development. It paid off.

In 2011, he earned All-American honors, and in the same year, the Atlanta Braves selected him in the first round of the MLB draft. Four years of grinding through the minor leagues followed, long bus rides, uncertain futures, and no guarantees about where he would be playing next season. The work finally paid off in 2015, when he reached the majors with the New York Mets, the same year he first connected with McEnany. Their relationship developed without the fanfare that would later surround her public career.

There were no dramatic headlines, no carefully staged public appearances. Instead, they built something more durable, a partnership tested by genuine distance. McEnany was consumed by demanding political work, often on the road or in campaign headquarters, while Gilmartin traveled constantly for a sport that offered no stability from one season to the next. That kind of long-distance grind breaks plenty of relationships.

Theirs held. They married on November 18, 2017. The following years saw their family grow steadily. Their first daughter, Blake Avery, was born in November 2019.

A son, Nash, arrived in 2022. Then, in March 2025, McEnany made a personal announcement on air, telling viewers that the couple was expecting their third child, due that June. The quiet resilience that sustained their marriage through years of minor league bus rides and uncertain futures shaped Gilmartin into exactly the steady presence someone in McEnany’s high-pressure world would need. He never chased the spotlight.

He never complained about the distance. He never let his own athletic ambitions overshadow her political rise. Instead, he simply showed up, game after game, season after season, proving that real strength often looks nothing like fame. There is a small, nearly amusing detail tucked into their story.

Gilmartin is actually the cousin of Chad Gilmartin, whom McEnany later named her own principal assistant press secretary. A coincidence that quietly tied his extended family directly into her professional world. As for her following his career, McEnany has spoken warmly about it, even while consumed by her own demanding schedule. She would watch his games from campaign headquarters, from airplanes, wherever the trail happened to take her that week.

There was another coincidence in all of this, too. Her own family had held season tickets to his eventual team, the Tampa Bay Rays, for over a decade before he ever signed with them. A small, sweet twist neither of them could have planned. So the man occasionally glimpsed just off to the side in political photographs isn’t some anonymous plus-one at all.

He’s a former first-round MLB draft pick who quietly built an entire career of his own long before most people watching the news ever connected the face beside her to anything at all.