Still marveling two days later over his major-league moment of truth, Neal Cotts recalled the lie Tuesday night that ultimately started the trip from his backyard in Belleville, Ill., to the World Series mound.
One summer day, back when the White Sox left-handed reliever was a sophomore two-sport standout at Lebanon High School, he fibbed to his baseball coach that a family function would prevent him from attending a game.
The family function was a soccer tournament.
“I wanted to play in that instead [of the baseball game],” confessed Cotts, a soccer star in the making during his youth.
The facts quickly surfaced because Cotts could no longer hide them–not while wearing a cast. During the soccer match, Cotts broke his lower left leg so severely that surgery was needed to insert screws to hold it together.
A soccer career that once looked promising ended that day. He would miss the next two soccer seasons.
The injury turned into the break of his life.
Cotts recovered from the surgery well enough to run, but he could not cut the way he used to and lost quickness. Former Lebanon athletic director Ferd Lamar remembered the way Cotts would labor up and down the basketball court after the injury, trying to hide the obvious pain.
“The way he struggled with his leg made you squeamish watching him run,” Lamar said. “He said it never hurt, but it looked bad.”
Not surprisingly, not long after that his baseball future started to look good. Without soccer, Cotts poured all his energy into pitching. Soon the crafty lefty was throwing two no-hitters and a perfect game, and the college scouts flocking to the 204-student school were hard to ignore.
“I actually lied to my coach; that’s not really like me,” Cotts said in the Sox’s dugout, chuckling. “But it all worked out.”
Finding his spirit
Cotts’ success in the major leagues followed a similar theme: Something had to be broken before he flourished. But this time it was his spirit.
About midnight on Aug. 27, 2003, Cotts found out from former White Sox manager Jerry Manuel he would be making a spot start at Yankee Stadium in place of Mark Buehrle.
Cotts had started the Double-A All-Star Game that summer but was not prepared to perform at baseball’s version of Carnegie Hall.
“I remember talking to Neal about that night and him saying he was so nervous he could not even see the catcher’s glove,” said Jim Brownlee, the baseball coach at Illinois State, Cotts’ alma mater.
Yankees hitters had no trouble seeing Cotts’ pitches. Despite being spotted a 2-0 lead, he walked four and gave up five runs in one-third of an inning. The next morning, the Sox shipped Cotts back to Birmingham.
“I think I learned a lot from that,” Cotts said.
He learned that without poise, a pitcher cannot expect precision. So Cotts spent the winter working on controlling his pitches and his anxiety, returning in 2004 intent on proving to new manager Ozzie Guillen that he belonged at the major-league level.
But he had to believe it himself before Guillen would.
“I’m not the easiest on myself,” Cotts said. “Last year, if I wasn’t being used for 14 days, I’d be like, `Why wouldn’t you use me? What’s wrong with me?’ That’s the aspect you have to understand sometimes. It’s not always you.”
That maturity, forged through a mediocre 2004 season in which Cotts went 4-4 with a 5.65 ERA, helped him emerge this season as one of the American League’s most dependable left-handed relievers. Cotts worked with pitching coach Don Cooper on his mechanics. He zeroed in on the catcher earlier in his delivery and improved his slider and cut fastball.
As a result, Cotts won all four decisions and posted a 1.94 ERA in 69 appearances, numbers that convinced Guillen the 25-year-old could handle the most rugged of postseason tests.
In five playoff appearances, including Tuesday night’s Game 3, Cotts has given up one hit in two innings. In Game 1, when he struck out both Astros hitters he faced, his fastball was clocked as high as it has ever been at 94 m.p.h.
After Cotts became the first Sox lefty since 1919 to win a World Series game, Guillen predicted one day the guy they used to call “Bulldog” at ISU could be a legitimate closer.
“I could not care less,” Cotts said of his future role with the Sox. “Wherever they put me, I’m not going to complain either way. As long as I’m up here in a position to be counted on, that’s all that matters.”
Being accountable
Jack and Jane Cotts raised their son in an environment of accountability. Jack works in a steel mill and Jane teaches high school math, professions that demand the type of consistent approach Cotts has applied to his job this season.
Last summer, for example, Cotts was out for a night on the town in Chicago with some buddies from Illinois State when he noticed it was nearly midnight. The friends wanted him to stay out, but Cotts said he had to go and get some rest because he did not want to do anything to get in the way of what Cotts thought could be a special White Sox season.
He had dreamed of being able to pitch in a World Series, with the game on the line as it was Wednesday in the ninth inning, since the days when he put dirt on top of a board in his backyard and pretended it was a pitcher’s mound.
“I just got an out when we needed it and happened to be in the right place at the right time,” Cotts said.
He will let others get carried away with his success.
Back in Lebanon, Ill., students at Lebanon Elementary–St. Louis Cardinals country–wore white socks Tuesday to support their hero (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
At Illinois State, where legions of fans of the Sox and Cotts live, emotions ran so high after the pennant-clinching victory over the Los Angeles Angels that campus police had to step in when some students tried storming the school’s football field to tear down the goalposts.
“I know I’ve got a lot of support down there [at ISU],” Cotts said. “It’s a great place. I might not be here without that school. It gave me a lot.”
In kind, Cotts gave a little back. After the Oakland Athletics signed the second-round pick in 2001 and awarded him a $525,000 bonus, Cotts made a sizable donation to the Redbirds’ baseball program. He returns every winter to give clinics and visit old friends he considers family.
“I used to coach against Neal [at Evansville] and he used to beat our butts,” said Brownlee, who coached former major-league pitcher Andy Benes in his 23 seasons at Evansville before coming to ISU in 2002.
“And I can tell you in 30 years of coaching in the Missouri Valley Conference, I have never seen a pitcher more competitive than Neal Cotts. Just wait. He’s only 25.”
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dhaugh@tribune.com
