TORONTO – Chris Colabello was 21 years old, and it was Day 1 of his tryout with the independent Worcester Tornadoes.

The six-foot-four kid from nearby Framingham, Mass., strode to the plate for a situational hitting drill. Then-manager Rich Gedman remembers like it was yesterday: He put a runner on first and asked Colabello for a hit-and-run.

Colabello sent the first pitch he saw over the left-field fence.

“I thought it was kinda neat,” Gedman said recently, laughing. “But that was not the drill.”

And so, on the next time through, Gedman set up a base runner and again instructed Colabello to hit-and-run a second time. And again, Colabello clocked the ball over the left-field fence.

The explanation Gedman later heard from Colabello, when he sat the kid down and told him he was looking for bat control, not homers, was this: “When I talked to the Red Sox scout about being drafted, they said they’d like to see me hit the ball out of the ballpark,” Colabello said. “So I figured at this practice, I had to hit the ball out of the ballpark.”

“That was the first time I met Chris,” Gedman said. “A memorable start. We quickly found out he has this wonderful love of the game.”

It’s a game Colabello is no longer playing at the major league level. The Toronto Blue Jays first baseman, as everyone knows now, is serving an 80-game suspension after a performance-enhancing drug was found in his system.

All we know for certain is that Chris Colabello made a huge mistake. Knowingly, or unknowingly. And that this is the biggest hurdle the 32-year-old has ever encountered in his career, which is saying a lot, because Chris Colabello has encountered a ton.

As his best friend and former teammate Alex Trezza put it, Colabello made it to the big leagues for this reason: “You can’t tell the kid no.”

A profile story for Sportsnet Magazine was in the works on Colabello before this news broke on Friday. We had talked to his former teammates, to his friends, and left a message with his dad, Lou. A week ago, Colabello had agreed to spend Saturday afternoon with Sportsnet, after the Blue Jays played host to Oakland.

He’d agreed to rent a car and drive around the city and talk about his career, maybe hit the zoo, maybe take his puppy Clutch to a dog park. You could’ve suggested laser tag in Milton, Ont., and Colabello probably would’ve said yes. “Whatever you want to do,” he’d said, then handed over his phone number.



Colabello, seen here after a hitting a homer in the 2015 ALCS, enjoyed a breakout season last year. (Nathan Denette/CP)

Before he was suspended, before Colabello’s character was called into question, a picture of him emerged in talking to friends and former teammates. It’s of a guy who is obsessed with this game he’s now suspended from, who has a ton of belief in himself, and who was patient as hell—Colabello went undrafted, then played seven years of independent ball, then bounced around double-A and triple-A before finally it looked like he’d stuck in Toronto—while waiting to get his shot at the big leagues. It didn’t come until he was 29.

Right-handed pitcher John Birtwell met Colabello at a Detroit Tigers training camp (Colabello was the first guy sent home) and the two were later reunited on the Tornadoes.

“Nobody plays seven years of Indy ball. Nobody,” Birtwell says. “Everybody has given up by then. But Chris wouldn’t.”

There are stories for days about Colabello’s childlike enthusiasm for baseball.

Trezza, who now coaches a college team and is in touch with Colabello almost daily, remembers the first time Colabello hit an opposite-field home run. It wasn’t that long ago. “He’d been playing for six or seven years professionally, and he hits one the other way,” Trezza recalls. “He was so excited. I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re 25 years old, relax.’ But he has this obsession with hitting. It’s his whole life. There’s nothing he wants to do more than hit and play baseball.”

Friends say Colabello can eat a full hamburger in two bites, and he’ll be done his meal before you have the wrapper off your sandwich. He has a few nicknames, one is Juicy (“because it always seems like there’s something in his mouth,” says Trezza) and another is “Red Light Chris,” because he loves the spotlight and the running joke was he’d only hit home runs on TV nights when he played Indy ball.

Among his buddies there’s another running joke that every story Colabello tells ends with him hitting a home run. “He’ll start a story and be like, ‘I went to get a coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts and I sat watching this little league game for five minutes, drinking my coffee. That reminds me of the time I was three-for-four with three homers in little league,’” Trezza said, laughing. “Somehow, some way, it always gets back to a home run story.”

Just as every story about Colabello—even if you ask for off-the-field details—ends with a baseball story. Colabello would stay in the clubhouse talking baseball until the early hours, even in his seventh season with the Tornadoes. He has an obsession with hitting .300 (he was off to an awful start this season, with just two hits and a .069 batting average.)



Colabello has words with the home plate umpire after a called third strike in the ninth inning of a game against the Yankees this season. (Fred Thornhill/CP)

“He’d be like, ‘Trezz, I figured it out: If I got 47 for my next 128, I’ll hit .312,’” Trezza said. “And I’m like, ‘What?’

“More than any guy I’ve ever met, he never wavered from his thought that he should be in the big leagues and he was good enough. He was always getting better, too. If he had 15 home runs, he wanted 20. There were times where me, as his best friend was going, ‘This guy’s crazy, he still thinks he can hit fourth in the big leagues.’

“But if you talk to him now, he thinks he’s the best hitter in the world. And that’s what has always separated him: That belief.”

It was Birtwell who introduced Colabello to his now-agent, Brian Charles. Birtwell himself had contacted 29 of 30 MLB teams—all but the Twins—on behalf of Colabello and sent scouting videos of him following the 2011 season, when Colabello was named Independent Player of the Year.

Birtwell helped Colabello, he says, “because he deserves it. And I knew he wouldn’t make me look bad.”

You could see the pain in the face of Blue Jays manager John Gibbons when he addressed the media on Friday, when he called Colabello one of the most popular guys in the clubhouse, when he said: “It hurts me … I love the guy.”

He isn’t alone in baseball. Colabello is a well-liked guy around the ballpark.

“He’s a really good baseball player,” Gedman said. “But he’s probably as fine a young man as I’ve ever been around. He’s genuine as they come. He’s special people in my eyes.

“What’s really been great for him, is he’s not just happy that he got in the big leagues. He wants to make an impact. He’s going to try to make a long, prestigious career out of it. Hopefully he plays until he decides to rip the uniform off, because that’s the attitude that got him here. Either way, this is a no-fail story.”

But that was two weeks ago.

Now, this is a story of a likeable journeyman who loves baseball, and there’s a giant asterisk beside it. Only Colabello knows how the story is going to end.