I'm not sure how this story got lost in the shuffle, since summer is usually a slow news period for sports. However, now that it has resurfaced this month, I don't think I could take myself seriously as a writer if I didn't provide an article for my main 'employer.'

Mike Coolbaugh was in the news this summer. It wasn't anything he did during his career. Mike was a relatively no-name baseball player, spending most of his career in the minor leagues, with merely a couple of cups of coffee at the major league level. However, the old saying goes that the greatest hitters make the worst coaches, because they attempt to turn everyone into who they were. Thus, the fairly mediocre Coolbaugh became the hitting coach for the Colorado Rockies' AA affiliate, the Tulsa Drillers.

Okay, calling him mediocre is a little unfair. Coolbaugh put up numbers in the 1996-97 seasons, in the Texas and Oakland minor league systems, that would have made him a fringe prospect at worst. Instead, he not only wasn't promoted to AAA with Oakland, they didn't even keep him. Heck, any guy not named Barry who can put up a .290 average, 57 home runs and 185 RBI's in two years when he's approaching his mid 30's is impressive, even if he did it at AAA. So Coolbaugh wasn't mediocre, he just didn't have his peak years at the same time as his window of opportunity.

Either way, Colorado took him in at Tulsa. Coolbaugh had only been with the Rockies organization for one year prior, that 1998 season after Oakland didn't keep him. He was very welcome within the organization anyway and quickly enamored himself with the players by being extremely friendly and taking his time with his teaching - coaching players through their mistakes rather than yelling for them to fix them, cracking jokes in the dugout when things were down.

All that led to this season, when Mike was asked to fill in as first base coach at the beginning of July. Life was good, the team was still hitting, and then July 22nd came. Mike was struck behind his left ear (right around a bony point called the mastoid process - go ahead, feel for it) by a foul ball off the bat of Tino Sanchez, and was dead by the time he got to the hospital.