Raider Nation
Devil's Advocate
In clubhouses from Class A to the majors, even superstars such as Albert Pujols still speak in awe of the promise of Brian Cole
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IN AUGUST 1994 major league baseball players were on strike, and Reds reliever Johnny Ruffin was in Mississippi, near his home, trying to keep his arm loose. One muggy afternoon he pitched some innings in a game at Cheyenne Park, a gritty ball field nestled in the woods between Meridian and Collinsville. They called it semipro ball, but the players never got a dime, even though several of them had played in college or the pros. Greg Cole, who had been an outfielder at Southern Miss in the early '90s, struggled that day against Ruffin. "Johnny knew me, so I got nothing but nasty sliders," Cole recalls. "I didn't touch anything. None of us did."
Greg had brought along his little brother on a lark. Fifteen-year-old Brian Cole stood in the batter's box, wagging a bat that seemed nearly as tall as he was, staring unafraid at Ruffin, a 6' 3" whip of a man with a filthy low-90s slider that he'd forged on fields just like this one. Ruffin lifted his knee and unleashed a hissing bottle rocket that he later swore was "at least 92." The hiss became a crack that echoed into the pine trees some 500 feet away, soon followed by the ball. When Brian Cole touched home plate, all 5' 4" and 130 pounds of him, the only jaw not on the ground was his own. "He was just smiling," Greg says. "He didn't know."
Ruffin later discovered that the pitching rubber at the field was only 55 feet from home plate. "So my 92 probably looked to him like 97 or 98," Ruffin says. "It wasn't the kind of thing you forget."
More than 18 years later, the legend of Brian Cole blows through the wildflowers that now cover Cheyenne Park and the other neglected diamonds around Meridian. And it lurks in a handful of big league clubhouses, where the mention of Cole's name makes some of the game's brightest stars light up.
"Of course I remember," says Yankees ace CC Sabathia. "It was my first start as a professional."
The Indians' brass had made a caravan to Burlington, N.C., on Aug. 4, 1998, to watch Sabathia, the towering 18-year-old lefty they'd drafted two months earlier in the first round17 rounds before the Mets picked the 5' 8", 160-pound centerfielder who was hitting cleanup for Kingsport that day. "I pulled Brian aside and said, 'Look, this guy's 6' 7" and throws 97, 98 and has a 93-mile-an-hour slider,' " recalls Tim Foli, who managed the Kingsport Mets that season following a 16-year playing career. "I told him, 'If you want to sit this one out, I won't think any less of you.' Brian just looked at me with that grin he had and said, 'I got it, Skip.' "
Sabathia hit 97 on the gun in the first inning. That was about the speed of the fastball Cole sent clanging off the wall in left center in his first at bat on his way to a two-hit night with a stolen base, an RBI and two runs scored. It would not be his last meeting with Sabathia, nor the most memorable, but it left an impression on the young pitcher who would go on to win 191 games (and counting) in the bigs. "Brian Cole," Sabathia says, "was the player who showed me I needed to develop an off-speed pitch."
"Let me tell you a few stories," Foli continues. "Brian would take a lead off third that was halfway down the line, and there was nothing the pitcher could do about it. Then one time he just scored. Ran across home plate standing up. It stunned all of us. He did it about four or five times that year. Stole home standing up."
Cole played outfield in the Mets' system from 1998 through 2000. He hit .306 with 42 home runs, 90 doubles, 193 RBIs and 135 stolen bases, numbers that might remind you of the ones Angels phenom Mike Trout put up in three-plus years in the minorsexcept that Cole had a lot more homers, doubles and RBIs and was 50 pounds lighter and five inches shorter than last year's American League Rookie of the Year.
"Have you seen him play?" asks Albert Pujols, as if that's the first question in any discussion of Cole. The Angels slugger played with Cole in the Arizona Fall League as a Cardinals minor leaguer in 2000, before he went on to win three National League MVP awards. "You'd think, man, this is just a little guy," Pujols says, "and then you were amazed by his powerdriving the ball into both gaps and then standing on third like it was nothing." Finally Pujols asks, "Have you talked to Heath Bell?"
"I collect bats," says Bell, the Diamondbacks reliever and three-time All-Star, "and I have only one that's unsigned, because Brian never got to sign it." When guests in Bell's home see the strange name branded on his prized bat but no signature, Bell says, "I sit them down and tell them about the best ballplayer I've ever seen."
"The first thing I think of is the one he hit off the scoreboard against me in Columbus, Georgia," says Sabathia, who was otherwise dominant on July 23, 1999, the second time he pitched to Cole. The big lefty allowed three hits and struck out seven in six innings, but Cole's blast is what he remembers from that night. It was "terrifying," according to a scout who saw it, and is still the subject of whispers among players who were there.
"He was a player we were going to build around as an organization," former Mets general manager Jim Duquette testified in a Mississippi courtroom in August 2010. "We were planning on David Wright at third base, Jose Reyes at short and Brian Cole in the outfield. We were hoping that somewhere around 2002 he would be on the scene as a rookie in the major leagues."
I almost gave birth to Brian on a baseball field," says Maudelene Cole, rocking in her chair one afternoon in Meridian. "It was the last game of the summer over at Crestwood Field."
Brian's father, William (Pee Wee) Coleshortstop, pitcher and captain of the Sandflat A's, one of the best semipro teams in Lauderdale Countygot his pregnant wife to the hospital on time on that September day in 1978. Then, for all intents, he drove the child right back to Crestwood, one of several fields in the area that once felt the spikes of Negro league greats such as Satchel Paige. Like Paige, Brian would learn the game by playing it against men two and three times his age on crude diamonds shielded from the world by miles of forest and screaming crickets. Before Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd pitched in the World Series for the 1986 Red Sox, he pitched for Pee Wee Cole's team at age 13.
Built like the college slot receiver and punt returner he would become, Brian was a coiled spring. The hand-eye coordination that his teammates and coaches still struggle to describethe ability to put the barrel of the bat on any pitch thrown near himwas honed with a broomstick and a pile of what Brian and his brothers called "cuckabugs." These spiky nuggets, which still fall from the sweet-gum trees in the yard outside the Coles's former house on 34th Avenue in Meridian, were fired at Brian by a daunting three-man rotation of Robert (Popeye) Cole, his oldest brother, the first black player to earn a baseball scholarship to Ole Miss; Greg, who starred at Southern Miss with future Pirates slugger Kevin Young; and Michael, the youngest and most athletic of the Cole kids until Brian came along. "They took over raising him," says Maudelene, who worked full time as a cashier at Captain D's Seafood on 22nd Avenue. "It was a wonderful thing, a blessing."
Brian earned all-state honors in both football and baseball at Meridian High, whose football program was then the most successful ever in a state that produces NFL talent the way it once produced cotton. Playing running back in a brutally simple offense, he averaged 12 yards from scrimmage. Recruiters from Florida State, Nebraska and Tennessee came to lure him to their megastadiums. But his passion was baseball.
High school baseball has been played in Mississippi since the 1920s. Cole was the first kid in the state to hit four home runs in one game. In his senior year he hit 10 homers in a six-game span, and set the 5A state season record with 22 home runs. It still stands.
Opposing coaches asked to check his bat. Some teams tried walking him, even when he led off an inning. They might as well have asked Cole to turn left out of the batter's box and take third. He'd steal his way there soon enough.
He wasn't perfect. The best player we've never seen, as both Sabathia and Pujols call him, had at least three weaknesses: He didn't care for schoolwork, he didn't always run out ground balls and he could become desperately homesick. His first weakness soon ceased to matter, for he was almost done with school. He would turn the second weakness into a strength, beating out routine grounders to second and frightening countless minor league infielders into errors. The third weakness, his homesickness, is the one he would never defeat, the one that would help bring about his end.
Bad grades kept Cole from Division I baseball, and his lack of size pushed him to the 36th round of the 1997 draft. His brother Greg turned down the $5,000 signing bonus offered to Brian by the Tigers and drove him to Corsicana, Texas, just in time for football season at Navarro Junior College.
In the fall of '97, near the end of an all-conference season as a receiver and kick returner, Brian's football coach, Keith Thomas, walked him over to meet Navarro's baseball coach, Skip Johnson. "We went straight from football practice," Thomas recalls. "Brian was wearing football cleats, and sweats that were still wet from his shoulder pads."
Johnson says, "The first fly ball I hit him, he falls flat on his face. Then he pops up and runs it down and catches it at the wall like a touchdown pass."
"Willie Mays--type deal," Thomas says. "Me and Skip just looked at each other."
"Ask Brad Hawpe," says Johnson, now the pitching coach at Texas. "If he doesn't tell you Brian Cole is the best player he's ever seen, I'd be shocked."
"It'd be hard to say he wasn't," says Hawpe, who has played eight years and hit 124 home runs in the big leagues after starring at Navarro and then LSU. "That first day he raced our fastest guy and beat him by three or four steps, and he wasn't even running. Then he picked up a bat, and ... it was beyond special."
Cole's statistics during his lone season at Navarro were "just crazy, Wiffle-ball numbers" says Dave Lottsfeldt, the Mets scout who signed him. Cole hit .524 and smacked 27 home runs, more than double the previous school record. He stole 49 bases, drove in 82 runs and scored 95in 60 games. "And this was a very good level of baseball," says Hawpe. "We played against tons of guys who went on to D-I [and] pro ball." The football player no one had heard of was named Baseball America's junior college player of the year.
Three years later, in the spring of 2001, a young pitcher named Mark Hamilton was playing Class A ball in Battle Creek, Mich., when a question was kicked around the bullpen one night. "Who was the best player you ever played with?" The answers were familiarKerry Wood, Torii Hunter, Vernon Wellsuntil Hamilton's turn came. "The best player I've ever seen, hands down," he said, "was a guy named Brian Cole."
The relievers looked confused, but in a corner of the bullpen a righthanded submariner named Mike Ribaudo nearly fell off the bench. "I said, 'Wait a minute, what the f--- did you just say?' " remembers Ribaudo, who had played a season with Cole in the Mets' system.
"It was Mike's secret, and he thought he was the only one who knew it," recalls Hamilton, who had pitched against Cole while at Panola [Texas] Junior College.
"I wanted to hug [Mark]," Ribaudo says. "We were like two guys who had seen the same UFO."
Hamilton told the bullpen skeptics how he'd offered Cole a first-pitch changeup the first time he faced him. Cole had swung and missed by a mile, and somehow Hamilton had struck him out. "After I got drafted," Hamilton said, "a scout with the Indians visits me and says, 'I was at one inning of one game your freshman year, and I saw you face one hitter. I'm here because you struck out Brian Cole.' "
"All the fish stories you're hearing are true," says Rob Walton, a former Indians scout who is the pitching coach at Oklahoma State. "I watched him five times that year [1998], sometimes just for the experience of it. I told [my bosses], 'This is the reason we drive all these miles. This guy Cole.' I haven't seen a guy like him since."
"That scout didn't see the home run he hit off me," Hamilton says. "That same game, I threw him a slider that slipped out of my hand, and Brian jumpedhis feet actually left the groundand he hit it out to right center. It looked like a dang pitchout, and he hit it 450 feet the other way."
Lottsfeldt saw it. "It was a foot off the plate and a foot over his head," the former Mets scout remembers, his voice falling to a whisper. "I just said, My Lord."
Duquette, then the Mets' assistant G.M., remembers reading Lottsfeldt's glowing reports about Cole. "I asked Lottsy, 'What's it gonna cost us to sign him?' He said, $100,000. I said, 'Why so low? I was thinking he'd cost us a million dollars.' He said, 'He's 5' 8".' "
The Mets picked Cole in the 18th round, and Lottsfeldt drove from Texas to Meridian to sign him. He found Brian living with his dad (Pee Wee and Maudelene had split up in 1988) in a house with more than one missing window. The football recruiters were still hoveringFlorida State's Bobby Bowden would continue to call Cole throughout his minor league careerbut Brian had always dreamed of providing for his mother, so he deposited his $100,000 signing bonus in the bank where Greg worked and flew to Kingsport. He had to change planes in Atlanta and missed his connecting flight because he went to baggage claim. He didn't know his bags would be placed on the next plane for him. He'd never flown before.
When Cole arrived at Kingsport, he didn't look the part of a minor league prospect. "My cleats weren't cleaned from the night before," says former Mets minor leaguer Brian Jenkins, "and I asked one of the clubhouse kids if he could do it. He was like, 'Nah, man, I just got drafted. I just signed to play with y'all.' That first batting practice, my foot was in my damn mouth. I stood there like, Where's he getting this pop from, man?"
Cole spent less than a season in rookie ball, and the next year he assaulted the South Atlantic League with his lavish Negro leagues style of playswing hard, run harder. He had 50 stolen bases, 71 RBIs (from the leadoff spot), 18 home runs and 97 runs scored in 125 games.
In 2000, after three absurdly productive months in the Florida State League (.312, 15 home runs, 61 RBIs, 54 steals, 73 runs), Cole was promoted to Double A Binghamton. Double A is where raw talents usually meet their match, and the Eastern League is where Cole met his. He hit .136 in his first 59 at bats. "Pitchers are a lot smarter up here," he confessed to a reporter. "You don't get those 2--0 fastballs that you get down in Single A."