Heart of the Game: Life, Death and Mercy in Minor League America, by S.L. Price
Ecco/HarperCollins, 2009
Rating: 10 (out of 10)
By James Bailey
It’s a clichéd ambition to pass out of this life doing what one loves: the fisherman with his fly rod, the golfer in the tee box, the baseball lifer on the diamond. Mike Coolbaugh—a survivor of 17 years in the bush leagues—met his end on a ball field in North Little Rock, Arkansas. His passion for baseball, however, provided scant consolation to those who knew and loved him—and even less to the man who hit the foul ball that dropped him stone dead in the first base coach’s box two years ago.
In Heart of the Game, S.L. Price does much more than tell the story of Coolbaugh’s death at the age of 35. He celebrates Coolbaugh’s life, which revolved around his family every bit as much as it did his long career in professional baseball. Price intertwines this with the story of Tino Sanchez, who lives with the undeserved guilt as the author of that deadly line drive.
Both men were baseball lifers, with Sanchez putting 11 years into the minor leagues before bowing out after the 2007 season. Their stories, in many ways, parallel those of hundreds of other young men who follow their dream from small town to small town, occasionally losing sight or hope of reaching the big leagues. Coolbaugh made a couple of brief stops in the majors, hit a couple of dingers. Sanchez never did. Quite possibly his playing career would have drawn to a close anyway after the ’07 season based on his .175 average in 57 at-bats at Double-A Tulsa. Had he hit .300 that year, it would have made the decision to walk away more difficult, but Sanchez’s passion for playing the game died on that Arkansas field when Coolbaugh hit the turf.
Coolbaugh’s playing career concluded the season before, after a frustrating and injury-plagued year at Triple-A Omaha. He didn’t get to make the call himself. It was made for him. When spring rolled around without a single contract offer, he stayed home with his expectant wife and two young sons, playing a new role as a full-time dad. When a rare midseason coaching opportunity arose at Tulsa, he jumped at the chance, returning to the Texas League, where he had spent parts of two seasons as a player. His older brother Scott, who played 13 years, was the hitting coach for the Frisco RoughRiders, and they looked forward to their first head-to-head meeting as coaches in early August.
They never made it to that matchup. On July 22, in his 18th game as a minor league coach, Mike Coolbaugh made a rookie mistake of watching the runner instead of the hitter. Sanchez’s liner caught him behind his left ear, just above the neck. He fell without even reaching up his hands. Though he wasn’t pronounced dead until later at the hospital, that was a mere formality. Coolbaugh’s life came to an end before the trainers rushed out of the dugouts.
As Price posits more than once, Coolbaugh’s death wouldn’t likely have been so universally mourned had he died in a car wreck. Maybe the Texas League wouldn’t have taken up a collection for his widow and kids. Maybe his sons wouldn’t have thrown out the first pitch at the Rockies’ first home playoff game that fall. And that would have been a shame, because the Coolbaugh we meet in Heart of the Game is an everyman underdog with a twist: He’s a better person than we are, but we like him anyway. He did things right, on and off the field. He wrote love notes to his wife and cherished his time with his children. He maximized his potential, even though he didn’t spend much time in the big leagues, hitting 258 minor league home runs and collecting nearly a thousand RBIs. And he deserves to have been immortalized in these pages.
Credit Price for having the courage to dive headlong into this story. He steps respectfully through the aftermath, eliciting yet-smoldering heartbreak from the families of both Coolbaugh and Sanchez. This isn’t the 5 O’Clock News camped out on the family’s doorstep. In fact, Coolbaugh’s widow Mandy shares such personal items as poems and letters written by her husband during their 11 years together. Someday, when her children are much older, she may even be proud for them to read this book.
Here they will see their father as they never got the chance in life. While it’s not as personal a story to the rest of us who never met Mike Coolbaugh, it’s a compelling read all the same. Highly recommended, and not just for baseball fans.
