The question was delivered as directly as a right-down-the-pipe fastball: Did you expect this kind of season?
But Chris Colabello read it like a backdoor slider.
“That’s kind of a loaded question,” he said, grinning.
Which, of course, it was.
If Josh Donaldson, Troy Tulowitzki, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion or any number of Toronto Blue Jays had led baseball’s most productive offense with a .321 batting average and carried an .886 on-base-plus-slugging percentage, nobody would have asked.
But Colabello is not like the others.
He is a 31-year-old first baseman and outfielder who did not make the team out of spring training and has taken one of baseball’s most serpentine roads to the big leagues: four years at Division II Assumption College, seven years playing in an independent league and running through too many stop signs to count.
So it figures that Colabello, who could not prevent the Blue Jays from falling into an 0-2 division-series deficit against the Texas Rangers despite a double and single in Friday’s loss, views his journey and current standing differently from most, something more than Cinderella with a bat.
Look around any major league clubhouse, and every player has a story. The Blue Jays are no different. R.A. Dickey, after being a first-round pick, was discovered to be missing a ligament in his pitching elbow. Reliever Mark Lowe is diabetic. Donaldson, the team’s star, grew up while his father was in prison. A connective thread is perseverance.
Colabello came by his during the seven seasons he spent in the Can-Am League, whose teams in the Northeast United States and Canada are not affiliated with Major League Baseball clubs. Independent leagues are the last-chance saloons of professional baseball, populated by washouts, long shots and the occasional familiar name — Jose Canseco, Rickey Henderson or Oil Can Boyd — who cannot let go.
Few find their way into organized ball. Fewer still reach the big leagues.
The lucky ones live with host families, get paid something close to the minimum wage and have their paychecks arrive on time. The mission of these teams is not to develop prospects — it is to make money. This explains why the Nashua Pride, where Colabello briefly played, used to let skier Bode Miller, a New Hampshire native, play for them on occasion.
When the Worcester Tornadoes folded, the year after Colabello left, the team’s uniforms were seized for failure to pay a cleaning bill, and employees were locked out of team offices as movers packed furniture.
Colabello, who grew up in Milford, Mass., outside Boston, expected something more when he graduated from Assumption in 2005. The previous summer, he made the All-Star game in the New England Collegiate Baseball League with several future major leaguers and worked out for the Red Sox.
But when Colabello followed the draft, he watched more than 1,500 names called — but not his.
“Every time they went, ‘The Colorado Rockies select Chris ...” his father, Lou Colabello, said, wincing at the memory. “He’ll never tell you this, but he went in his bedroom with his glove and his bat and his ball, and he laid in his bed and cried for two days. His life was baseball.”
That has not changed.
Colabello graduated magna cum laude from Assumption, studying economics and marketing. He is fluent in Italian and Spanish, and he spent one winter working for the San Jose Sharks’ minor-league affiliate in Worcester, Mass., which might have led to a front-office career if he had been willing to give up baseball.
The singular focus was evident even in the formative years he spent in Rimini, Italy, a town on the Adriatic coast. He was never drawn to soccer, the national pastime, but the years he spent there — in the first, second, fourth and fifth grades — shaped him in other ways, particularly the pace of life and how close-knit Italian families can be.
His return to the United States was jarring.
“You don’t really take time out to appreciate the surroundings you’re in, the people you’re around, or the food you’re eating,” Colabello said. “When I would come back over here and build relationships, it never felt like it was the same. Friendships never felt like they were as deeply rooted.”
Shortly after the draft, Colabello got a call from Rich Gedman, manager of the Tornadoes, with an invitation to play. To a generation of Red Sox fans, Gedman was the gritty embodiment of their then hard-luck team: an undrafted local youngster who became a two-time All-Star catcher.
In Colabello, Gedman found a kindred spirit. Colabello was the first to the park and last to leave, often after long talks with Gedman. The manager took note that Colabello would invite teammates to his parents’ house for dinner and help clean up the dugout after games.
“He was a young pup when he started,” said Gedman, now the hitting coach for the Red Sox’s Class AAA affiliate in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. “But anything and everything that made sense, he was about. He was hungry for knowledge. He wanted to know anything and everything about ‘How do I have success in this game?’ and ‘What separates players?’”
Gedman’s assertion that Colabello could hit in the big leagues was a security blanket that he clung to when he continued to hit .300 year after year with little interest from major league clubs. He was invited to spring training with Detroit in 2006 but did not stick, and he would participate in tryouts — he worked out for the Red Sox in four states. But after a while, he became weary.
“When scouts would say, ‘Would you come to this tryout?’ I would say, ‘What can I do in one day that you don’t already know about me?’” Colabello said.
Through those seven seasons, Colabello lived with his parents, Lou and Silvana, and cobbled together an income putting on baseball clinics and giving private lessons. He had opportunities to go to Italy and, when he was a minor leaguer with the Twins, an opportunity to sign for nearly $1 million to play in South Korea. But he never quit on the idea of playing in the big leagues.
“I used to have what I called logical talks with him,” said Lou Colabello, a recently retired teacher who did not want his son to be like him, combing through The Boston Globe’s classifieds at age 35 looking for a job. “How many guys, 26, 27, 28, that aren’t pitchers sign out of an independent league? Are you the lucky one? I know you love the game, but you worked real hard to get the diploma you got, and it’s worth something. Will it be worth something at 36, 37, 38?”
He continued, “But I would never, ever say to him, ‘Give up the game,’ because I know how much it meant to him.”
Lou Colabello also had a brush with athletic glory, although it unfolded differently. He pitched for Italy, where he was playing professionally, in the 1984 Olympics. His coach thought it would be a good idea for an American-born player to start against the United States, with its lineup of future major leaguers, at a sold-out Dodger Stadium.
Lou, with a slow curveball and an 84-mph fastball, did not survive the first inning. He gave up nine runs, including a three-run homer to Will Clark, escaping with one crumb of dignity: a strikeout of Mark McGwire.
When Chris Colabello met Clark, he remembered the game — and the pitch he hit. He signed a baseball for Chris to pass on to his dad: Best of luck, Lou. Always remember: You hang ’em, I bang ’em.
Lou cackled when he told the story. As he and Silvana, who grew up in Italy, sat at Yankee Stadium watching their son taking batting practice before the Blue Jays played the New York Yankees recently, he said he sometimes has trouble believing that his son is playing with players like Bautista, Donaldson and Tulowitzki, or that Wayne Gretzky, who visited the Blue Jays’ clubhouse, knew his son by name.
Chris Colabello’s break came in 2012, when the Twins signed him and sent him to Class AA New Britain, Conn., where he hit .284, with 19 home runs and 98 runs batted in. He earned a promotion in 2013, and after hitting .352, with 24 homers and 76 RBIs, at Class AAA Rochester, New York, he was called up to the Twins. He hit .194 in a two-month cameo, and in 2014, he hit .229, a hot start dissipating after a thumb injury.
The Twins placed him on waivers, where he was claimed by the Blue Jays.
Colabello, who hit 15 home runs and had 54 RBI in 333 at-bats and had an 18-game hitting streak shortly after his May call-up, found his playing time curtailed after the end of July, when the Jays acquired Ben Revere, who has given them a leadoff hitter and better defense in left field. Colabello platoons with Justin Smoak at first base, playing mostly against left-handers.
“Being a big leaguer is about having the ability to adjust every day, being able to deal with failure, being able to deal with scrutiny and still find a way to have a positive attitude every day,” Colabello said. “At the beginning of the year, my goal is to be the best hitter on the planet. It might sound unreasonable to a lot of people, but the reality is, if you shoot for the stars and you miss, you might land on the moon.”
Which, at least for one Blue Jay, no longer seems as far away as a World Series.
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