Coste grasps the game's good and bad

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time. – former big league pitcher and author Jim Bouton.

Hang around the minor leagues long enough and you come to realize that baseball is an equal opportunity failure broker.

Take Phillies catcher/first baseman Chris Coste, for instance. A 34-year-old veteran of 13 seasons, he may be the poster boy for all that is bad about the minor leagues . . . as well as all that is good.

His story is worthy of at least a television movie.

Coste was a three-time Division III All-American as a pitcher and third baseman at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn. He compiled a .442 career batting average and a 2.11 ERA, but he went undrafted.

“I really thought I had a chance to get drafted after my senior year,” Coste said. We made the regional tournament, and there were probably 30 scouts in the stands. Almost every major league team was there watching a pitcher we were playing against. I had my team’s only two hits – a home run and a double – and a walk against him. I hit .488 that year. I really thought I was going to get drafted after that, but it just didn’t work out.”

It turned out that disappointment was his first step in a long journey on a bed of baseball nails. He did, however, manage to hook up with the Brandon Grey Owls of the lowly and since departed Prairie League.

A year later, in 1996, his hometown of Fargo, N.D., was awarded a Northern League franchise. Coste tasted instant success, not to mention unexpected celebrity.

“I had four great seasons there,” he said, “and after the fourth year it was understood that I was going to be the manager one day. I wasn’t making a ton of money, but I was incredibly happy. I had my own sports-radio talk show; I had just written a book about the Northern League; I had a wife and daughter; and, I’ll tell you what, I was incredibly content and happy with life at the time.”

He had compiled a .323 average with the Redhawks, with noteworthy offensive numbers all across the board.

The Cleveland organization came calling, and at 27, and in the prime of his baseball life, Chris Coste turned down his first opportunity to play for an affiliated team.

“My manager (at Fargo) called me up and pretty much aired me out,” Coste remembered. “He convinced me when he said, ‘You’re going to wake up in your bed one day when you’re 50 and wonder what would have happened if you had given it a shot.’ At the moment I realized he was right.”

Baseball is an unrelenting war of nerves. - Ty Cobb.

There is something at this point you need to know about Chris Coste: Some athletes don’t travel well at the speed of thought. Coste hardly belongs in that class.

Two years later, in 2002, he found himself at Triple-A Buffalo, a long way from indy ball, where he hit .318, scalded 32 doubles and led the International League with 152 hits. Which the Indians chose to ignore when it came time to consider September call-ups.

Coste chose not to mope or whine, or consider retirement. Instead, he took a practical view of his situation at the time.

“Obviously when you play baseball and your wear that uniform you want to reach the highest levels and play in the Major Leagues,” he said, “and I had come so far, that all of a sudden I was so close. To walk away didn’t make any sense. The money was good enough to keep at it, but more importantly, I had seen guys like myself go to the Major Leagues on what seemed like an everyday basis, so once again, it didn’t make any sense to walk away.”

Still, baseball often fails to play fairly, but what do you expect from a sport that encourages stealing?

By 2005, Coste was with the Phillies, his fifth organization, and playing in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, where he wound up an IL all-star. Playing a career-high 134 games, he hit .292 with career bests of 20 home runs and 89 RBIs.

Once again, though, he would head home to Fargo when the season ended.

“There have been a tremendous amount of frustrations in my career,” he said, citing his role as a utilityman. “So at the end of the season, instead of catching 100 games, or even 80 games, I’ve caught 30 or 40 games, enough to remain a catcher, but not ultimately a catcher.

“In Minor League Baseball we always talk about timing and being in the right place at the right time. You have to be a good player, that’s the most important thing, but there’s also a certain level of timing that you have to have. Unfortunately, I’ve not had the greatest of timing.”

Things would get worse . . . and then they would get better. Considerably better. Finally.

Coste hit an incredible .463 in spring training last year. Nailed three home runs and knocked in 11 runs. Never mind. He found himself back in Triple-A to start the season, where, in late May, hitting a paltry .177, he was summoned to Philadelphia, giving him the distinction of being, at 33, the oldest Phillies rookie in more than 60 years.

“If I had known I could hit .177 and get called up I would have done that a long time ago,” Coste joked.

After a slow start – well, truth be told, he went 0-for-13 – he began to blister the baseball. He hit .372 in July and .351 in August, and his finger prints were all over the comeback scene. He had performed far beyond his pay grade.

“We finished the season in Florida against the Marlins, and I remember on the plane ride back to Philly I was incredibly disappointed we didn’t make the playoffs, because we came so close,” he said. “For me it would have been an incredible finish to my story to make the playoffs and, who knows, maybe win the World Series. I knew if we would have made the playoffs I was going to catch most of those games, and it would have solidified myself more as a catcher in the big leagues; but I thought I had done that anyway.

“And then my agent would e-mail me newspaper articles from the Philadelphia area (in the offseason), and reading quotes from (GM) Pat Gillick saying things like they needed to work on improving the bullpen and tightening up the catching. I was absolutely blown away. I couldn’t believe I had read that.”

It was true. Gillick picked up veteran receiver Rod Barajas, and despite hitting .328 with one key hit after another down the stretch last year, Coste finds himself back in Double-A, in Reading, a move, by the way, he requested so he could catch more regularly.

Coste was hitting .321 with four home runs and 17 RBIs in 14 games, with a whopping .571 slugging percentage.

My wife, when she first came out to the ballpark in Reading, she thought the Reading Phillies were little kids – you know, Little Leaguers. It was funny. – former all-star pitcher Mark Davis.

“Compared to (Triple-A) Ottawa, this place is great baseball-wise,” Coste said about his new adopted home. “Everyone knows that Reading is a great baseball city. Even though it’s not the major leagues, there’s still that little bit of a rush that you get as a player when you have a sell-out crowd, and you have a good atmosphere, and that’s what Reading has.”

For all his disappointments and frustrations, Coste is reflective, almost forgiving, when he talks about the recent past.

“I don’t know if I’ve gotten used to it, and it’s not that I’ve come to expect it, but there are definitely frustrations,” Coste said. “I think the thing that keeps me afloat is knowing how bad today might be or yesterday was, that any day that phone call could come (from Philadelphia). The problem is that every day that passes I seem to get further away from the big leagues, because at the end of the season it’s not always about who has the best year; it’s about the fit.

“I would love to be in the big leagues with this organization next year. I would love to play for the Phillies the rest of my career. When I’m done I would love to manage the Phillies way down the road. Philly gets a bad rap for a lot of things, but no city in all of baseball could have taken to me the way the Philadelphia fans did, and if it meant going to the big leagues and going somewhere else, I would obviously welcome it; but if I could choose, I would give anything to stay in Philadelphia and be appreciated by the fans the way I have been.”

You must agree, pulling for Chris Coste to make it back to the big leagues is hardly a stretch.

“Obviously, every guy here, and especially me, wants to get to the big leagues, but I realize that wherever baseball takes me, that happens to be my path, then I’ll follow that path as long as I have a uniform on my back,” he said. “I tell myself that every single day. I told myself that back in 1995 when I first began to play independent ball – wherever I happen to be at the time, it’s going to have to be my own major leagues, and that’s the way it will always be.”

This story was posted on June 14, 2007