Leaving Worcester
In terms of Worcester, it couldn’t have come at a better time, but you could have said that four or five years ago when he got traded or anything like that.
– Keith Beauregard, assistant coach at Santa Clara University
While the daughters of the City Manager were not typical guests of Colabello and Cantiani when they sat down for lunch, Keith Beauregard was. Currently an assistant baseball coach at Santa Clara University in Northern California, Beauregard competed against Colabello in college and then was his teammate for three years with the Tornadoes. “He’s one of my closest friends,” Beauregard says of Colabello. “That’s my boy right there.”
They both grew up near Massachusetts – Beauregard is from Leominster and Colabello is from Milford – and chose to play Division II baseball locally in the Northeast-10 Conference: Beauregard played for St. Anselm in Manchester, N.H. and Colabello played for Assumption College in Worcester. Because the baseball community in Massachusetts is smaller than it is in hardball hotbeds like California, Texas, and Florida, the two knew each other from playing summer ball and in high school. “We played against each other in the same conference, so it was one of those things: I wanted to beat him every time and he wanted to beat me,” says Beauregard, “but when we got to Worcester we had mutual respect for one another.”
The two had lockers next to one another while playing for the Tornadoes and established a daily routine. They went to the cages with manager Rich Gedman, a major leaguer who played from 1980 to 1992 and spent 11 years with the Boston Red Sox, and hitting coach Barry Glinski, who coached at Assumption from 1981 to 1988. Both players say that it was the close bond they had with their team – a ragtag collection of players that had played all levels of the game (“You had guys from South America, guys from Australia, and then you had your Canadians,” says Beauregard. “It was an extremely diverse culture.”) – that allowed Worcester to win a Can-Am championship in 2005.
But two years later Worcester was slumping and Colabello, hitting .300 in the heart of the order, was traded to the Nashua Pride in the middle of the season. Suddenly, Worcester’s native son was hitting cleanup for a team in New Hampshire. The decision to deal Colabello took a toll on Gedman, who like Cantiani and Beauregard had become incredibly fond of him. “I was very, very close to him and we spent an awful lot of time together and maybe it was a fault of my own that I was so close,” says Gedman, “but my thing was I felt he was better served by being traded than he would have by playing and going through what we were going through at the time.”
Colabello went on to win a championship with the Pride that year and returned to the Tornadoes in 2008. By that time, however, Beauregard had moved on. At age 25, he wanted to try his hand at real estate. He moved to New York, worked for Prudential Douglas from 2008-10, came back to the game in 2011 and played 11 games for Pittsfield and then went to work on Dan O’Brien’s staff at Santa Clara two years later.
Colabello was playing for Worcester in 2011, but the ground was falling beneath him. The team had trouble competing against all the baseball in the area – the Red Sox, Paw Sox, Lowell Spinners, legion, and high school – and found itself in financial trouble. The end was near when, after the 2011 season, the Minnesota Twins reached out to Colabello. In the Can-Am league, each team is only allowed five veteran players and was looking at signing Jose Conseco in order to draw a larger crowd and try to stay solvent. Colabello signed with the Twins that February and saw the team that he and Cantiani build go bankrupt and fold.
“In terms of Worcester, it couldn’t have come at a better time, but you could have said that four or five years ago when he got traded or anything like that,” says Beauregard. “It came at the right time. It came at the right time for him. His maturity as a hitter has increased greatly and his ability to generate power not only to his pull side, but to the opposite field side, his understanding of pitch selection, pitch sequences is unbelievable right now.”
So Colabello dodged a bullet in some sense by signing with the Twins, but there was still the matter of going from Mickey Mouse baseball, as Cantiani called the Can-Am league, to Associated ball.
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Tom Schreier can be heard on The Michael Knight Show from 2-3:00 on weekdays. He has written for Bleacher Report and the Yahoo Contributor Network. Follow him on Twitter @tschreier3. |