There are countless idle hours to be filled over the course of a baseball season, and Toronto Blue Jays reliever Robert Coello can credit his second trip to the big-leagues to some of the creative ways players pass the time.
Coming up as a catcher through the farm systems of the Cincinnati Reds and Los Angeles Angels, he and some of his teammates would often trade knuckleballs in the bullpen, trying to see who could make the ball dance best.
Only Coello never really threw a knuckler worthy of even that humble pursuit, so instead he messed around with different pitches and came up with an 80-plus m.p.h. forkball — gripped deep between his index and middle fingers with a seam in the middle — that did some quirky things.
“As a joke I’d say, ‘Hey, catch this,'” Coello, called up by the Blue Jays on Thursday, recalls during a recent interview. “It started to have a knuckle effect.”
The pitch went from joke to career-saver when in 2007 when the Angels, bursting at the seams behind the plate with Jeff Mathis, Mike Napoli, Bobby Wilson and Hank Conger in the system, suggested he consider a move to the mound.
Driving the idea from the Angels’ perspective was Coello’s big arm, which always stuck out during catching drills. The forkball — once the bread and butter of pitchers like Jack Morris and Dave Stewart but now a rarity in the game — took some selling, and “has become one of my top pitches now.”
“They laughed when I told them I had this forkball,” recalls Coello, whose fastball sits in the low to mid 90s. “When I started hitting the catcher, and they couldn’t catch it, started getting some strikeouts, that’s when people were like, ‘Oh, OK, that’s an interesting pitch you have.’
“Some people didn’t understand it, but ever since then it’s part of my game.”
Still, unlike Blue Jays closer Sergio Santos, who made the transition to pitching in 2009 and was in the majors to stay a year later, Coello’s switch has been anything but easy.
The 27-year-old made his debut as a pitcher with the Arizona League’s rookie ball Angels in ’07, appearing in 20 games, going 1-1 with a 1.31 earned-run average. But they parted ways at season’s end and the native of Bayonne, N.J., nearly fell off the baseball map the next year, splitting time between Calgary and Edmonton of the independent Golden Baseball League in 2008.
Coello’s performance there caught the attention of the Boston Red Sox, who signed him that November. Beginning the 2009 season in high-A Salem, the six-foot-five, 250-pounder worked his way up to triple-A Pawtucket, where he started the 2010 season under manager Torey Lovullo, the Blue Jays’ current first base coach, eventually earning a six-appearance September stint with the Red Sox, whose pitching coach at the time was Toronto manager John Farrell.
Those connections served Coello well when he became a free agent after the 2011 season, prompting him to sign with the Blue Jays.
“The opportunity I liked here was I was a familiar with people in the organization, and it just seemed like they had a real good group of guys here,” says Coello. “Our staff in triple-A, (pitching coach) Bob Stanley and (manager) Marty Brown, is just outstanding.”
Coello made a positive impression during spring training, earning praise from Blue Jays pitching coach Bruce Walton as someone who “pounds the ball down in the zone, has got a really good fastball and as got an out pitch with his forkball.”
“When he gets ahead and uses that, he’s very effective,” added Walton.
With triple-A Las Vegas, Coello was 3-1 with a 3.22 ERA in 17 games, two of them starts. He’s allowed 26 hits and 17 walks over 36.1 innings, striking out 38.
“His forkball is nasty,” says Brown. “It should look just like his four-seam fastball. The fastball is riding and going up, whereas the forkball is coming out of his hand and going down. He’s a north-south type pitcher. He’s had times when he can take his forkball and command it wherever he wants to, as well. Certain days it’s really good, certain days is what he’s still working on, consistency with it.”
When it’s on, Coello says the pitch comes out like an 80-plus m.p.h. knuckleball, floats to the plate, then drops. He throws it harder when he wants it to fall out of the zone, though his arm action should always be the same as on his fastball.
Many a hitter has been puzzled by the pitch as it goes by.
“I’ve heard it described in manners that wouldn’t be appropriate to say,” Coello says with a grin. “They take it and are like, ‘What the heck is that?’ That’s the input I get from catchers, the hitters don’t understand, it either freezes them or they swing and miss because they’re looking fastball.”
His stay with the Blue Jays may very well be a short one, as the team is carrying eight relievers at the moment and the expectation is they’ll go back down to seven after this weekend’s series with the visiting Red Sox.
Regardless of what happens, the call is further validation of his decision to toe the rubber. Not bad for a catcher taken in the 20th round of the 2004 draft by the Reds.
“I’d always hear you need to get out on the mound, you need to throw because you throw hard and your ball has that movement that jumps on people,” says Coello. “That’s why I gave it a shot, and it turned out for the best.”
