Sweet belief
Why Jays’ Colabello never gave up on himself.
“I felt like if I just kept playing long enough, at some point somebody would have to notice.” JAYS’ CHRIS COLABELLO
DUNEDIN— A year ago, Chris Colabello was an early cut from Blue Jays spring training camp.
Nobody missed him. Nobody waved goodbye. Nobody picked him off the waiver wire.
Dispatched to the minor league satellite was entirely in keeping with the trajectory of Colabello’s peripatetic baseball career.
Never drafted. Never much wanted. One-twothree-four-five-six-seven seasons of independent league ball. Flash-in-the-pan nova with the Twins at a big-league minimum salary — broke Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett’s franchise RBI record in April 2014 —and clubbed a home run against the Tampa Bay Rays while his mother was being interviewed on live television.
The team even staged a Chris Colabello Cowbell Night.
If Horatio Alger was writing this story, Colabello would have stepped across the threshold of sports heroism at that juncture. Instead, he sank into an 8-for-73 tailspin (nerve damage, right thumb, revealed only much later) and by the end of May had been shipped back to Triple A.
Colabello was just about the only person who still believed in Colabello.
“I always tried to use my eyes and my brain,” he says, recollecting those days of frustration and rejection. “The key to everything is to be honest with yourself, all the time. If you do that, your eyes will tell you a lot on a day to day basis. Sometimes we get too caught up in perceptions and labels and things other people are trying to get us to believe.
“By definition, if I had done that, baseball was telling me that I wasn’t a major league player. But every day I had affirmation, confirmation, from my peers, from my own eyes, that I was capable of doing what guys at the highest level were doing. I felt like if I just kept playing long enough, at some point somebody would have to notice. It was just going to be a matter of opportunity.”
As opportunity — fate — would have it, Toronto claimed Colabello off waivers that December.
An insurance widget, destined again for the minors.
If his name rang any bells north of the border, it would have been a hostile clanging. The Massachusetts native, playing for Team Italy in the 2013 World Baseball Classic, went four-for-five with a three-run homer when Italy stunned Canada 14-5. Colabello had spent much of his youth in Italy, where dad Lou pitched nine summers for a team in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast. Lou met and married Silvana there.
The son speaks Italian, some Spanish, but writes exclusively in English in the journal he’s been keeping for years and years, which might some day emerge as a baseball memoir.
He’s 32, loose-limbed and often sand-lot disheveled; essentially a Major League sophomore despite parts of two seasons in Minnesota.
When the Jays were in desperate need of a left fielder last May, they summoned journeyman Colabello — who wasn’t then, isn’t now, a left fielder — from Buffalo. His defensive misadventures out there were occasionally comic, always embarrassing. It was the baseball nomad’s bat that had drawn the parent club’s attention. And gosh, did he ever bring that boom with him: .368 by the end of May, at one point leading the majors with an 18-game hitting streak; .321 with a .367 on-base percentage and 15 homers in 101 games at season’s end, by which
Colabello has been keeping a journal for years and years, which might some day emerge as a baseball memoir
time manager John Gibbons had long-since ceased deploying him in the outfield, utilizing Colabello at first base and DH, anything to keep his bat in the lineup.
Back home in Milford, Mass., the Colabellos were cheering their only offspring. Neither parent had ever urged their son to grow up, get real, face facts — though he’d simultaneously managed to obtain a university degree in economics, with a minor political science.
“I pride myself on being a relatively intelligent person. There are all kinds of doors I wanted to keep open. I guess what it came down to for me is I always thought there’d be plenty of time after baseball to earn money or do whatever.” Even on the slippery side of 30. It takes faith, maybe delusion. And a defining self-assessment too, which made the indy years palatable.
“That last year I made a decision in my head that I didn’t need anybody to tell me I could or couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t need anybody to tell me I was a big leaguer. I knew I was. It might sound egotistical, but it was really a transition for me. I was at peace with what I was capable of, my ability to do it, where for a long time I was in search of approval. I was in search of everybody’s pat on the back — ‘hey, you can’ — or trying to impress people. When I finally decided that I didn’t need to impress anyone anymore and I just needed to look at myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say, ‘Hey, you’re OK’ that was kind of what happened. It seemed like the stars lined up.”
Colabello, a romantic at heart, offers an analogy.
“It’s like having a middle-school crush on a girl. She seems not to like you, then all of a sudden you turn around and there she is, smiling.
“When you’re searching for it, you never seem able to find it. When you stop looking for it, it usually pops up right in front of you.”
Far easier to project equanimity now, of course. Colabello is a valuable part of the Jays, if one-half of the club’s only genuine platoon tandem at first — a three-headed beast, actually, when including Edwin Encarnacion, who will likely see a lot of DH duty, and Justin Smoak.
Colabello will hit more against left-handed pitchers; Smoak against righties. Last season, Colabello and Smoak combined for 33 homers and Encarnacion socked 39 all by his lonesome — collectively, 224 RBIs, first in MLB among first basemen, albeit skewed because the numbers include DH appearances.
More sharesies for 2016.
“Nobody wants to sit on the bench . . . I certainly don’t. If somebody told me I was going to play every inning of 162 games, I’d be the happiest guy in the world. But whatever ends up happening I have to take it in stride, be supportive of my teammates, my coaches.
“Because there are a lot of things more important than me.”
Against Texas in the American League Division Series last fall, Colabello went six-for-16 with a homer. His batting average dipped in the ALCS versus Kansas City, five-for-23, with a home run.
“The greatest thing about postseason baseball, to me, makes me smile, whether it’s sandlot baseball or the majors: Nobody’s keeping track of your stats. You can be 0for-30, take one big swing and be a hero for a long, long time.”
He does have a favourite moment, though. Flip the view-master. “Hard not to say Jose’s homer.” You know Jose-who.