Day 9: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: "The 33-Year-Old Rookie: How I Finally Made It to the Big Leagues After 11 Years in the Minors"
The author: Chris Coste, Philadelphia Phillies catcher
How to find it: Ballantine Books, $25, 199 pages
Where we'd go looking for it: He's got links to Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble off his official website.
The scoop: They just love them "Rocky" stories in Philadelphia, don't they? Coste plays right into the myth of the underdog finally getting his shot on center stage. And if there was ever a Phillies player who did this before, too bad. They didn't write a book about.
Vince Papale of "Invincible" fame writes on the book jacket: "If you have an impossible dream and want to see a man and family who paid the price to make theirs come true, you have to read this book."
His current listing on the Baseball-Reference.com , which shows simply that he played 65 games in 2006, is all we'd know about him before this book.
After 3,688 at bats in 983 minor-league games, Coste finally got the call up that year. He said he had been sort of pigeon-holed as a utility player, and not strong enough to be a big-league catcher, until he'd finally convinced the Phillies he could call a game behind the plate.
"For me ... the most exciting call ame from ESPN's 'Cold Pizza,' asking me to come on the show as a guest," Coste writes. "Now I'd watched 'Cold Pizza' practically every day for years, so to receive an invitation like that was totally awesome."
Which shows you how mixed up the kid really was.
Coste homered in his first swing of the 2008 season last week. So maybe he's got a future in this game after all. And a movie script, unless Jim Morris has some copyright to it.
How it goes down in the scorebook: A tag-out at the plate.
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