Costes set to begin professional career and keep helping others who need him

Maxwell Costes has no memories of the old Memorial Stadium, the site just a couple of miles from where he grew up. But the trips to Camden Yards are priceless to Costes. So vivid. And far too many to count.

His membership in the junior fans club. Throwing out the ceremonial first pitch after his freshman season at the University of Maryland, where he batted .266/.397/.547 with 15 doubles, 15 home runs and 49 RBIs and earned first-team All-Big 10 honors, and after his Orioles 16-18 RBI team won its regional tournament and moved on the first-ever World Series for that age group.

Did he throw a strike?

“I did not, but it’s OK,” he said, laughing. “There was a lot of pressure. I’m not going to lie.”

The story of how Costes made his way from his Pen Lucy neighborhood in northern Baltimore City to Gilman School to four-year starter with the Terps – where he hit .298/.458/.560 with 37 doubles, 40 home runs and 145 RBIs - would provide a wonderful read, but the local kid keeps making good. And there’s more to him than the sport he plays.

So much more.

The Orioles signed Costes yesterday afternoon as an undrafted free agent, again contacting his advisor, Francis Marquez, following the completion of the 20^th round. The process was done online, with photos coming after he flies down to Sarasota on Sunday and takes his physical.

Area scout Donovan O’Dowd tracked Costes and made the phone call with news of the contract offer.

“There was always an inkling that the Orioles might take me. This is just like the culmination of a lot of people working on my behalf,” Costes said.

“The average person might say, ‘Oh, you didn’t get drafted,’ and to that I would say, it’s very hard to get into major league baseball as it is right now. So, to even be given an opportunity, I can’t say enough to how thankful and grateful I am for this.

“This is the type of thing you see in movies. Kid grows up in the state, plays high school baseball, he goes to the state’s flagship university, four years, there, gets his degree (in Psychology), and gets to go on and play for the major league organization. You can’t say enough about that.”

And perhaps one day, he’ll return to his favorite ballpark for more than a first pitch. He’s a corner infielder, a third baseman at Gilman who didn’t commit an error in three years before moving to first base in college because his position was too crowded, and because his only desire was to be in the lineup.

Something he’s hoping to do with the Orioles. At a venue that became a second home for him.

“Any chance I got as a kid, I was going to Camden Yards. I would ask my parents if we could go,” said Costes, whose older brother, Marty, is a Triple-A outfielder in the Astros system.

“I thought Camden Yards was the coolest thing every, I really did. I remember I would be really young, and I’d see the guys out there and I’m like, ‘Man, how do they do this?’ Guys are throwing the ball so hard. How do you hit a ball moving that fast? And now, here I am.”  

Costes will play a few games in the Florida Complex League and report to Single-A Delmarva. He didn’t follow the draft to see whether his name would be called, sticking to his workout routine and avoiding a potentially stressful situation.

Using the tools he’s been taught, the coping mechanisms.

This is where Costes’ story moves beyond his ability to barrel a fastball.

Costes is a mental health advocate who views his new contract in more than just dollars. He’s battled anxiety and depression, sought the assistance of people at Maryland, and now wants to keep helping others with similar traumas.

"I started to realize that, not just teammates, but other athletes at the university were going through the same thing I was going through, and nothing is being done about it, really,” he said. “Nobody really felt comfortable enough to speak out about anything, nobody really felt comfort to talk to somebody. I was sitting there and I’m like, ‘Bro, we’re suffering out here.’

“I remember the first time I really talked about my mental health struggles was at an all-athlete event at the school. I presented in front of them, and I’m never going to forget, there were like 40 different athletes from all the teams and they were coming up to me like, ‘Yeah, I felt like that before.’ I was like, ‘Man, this isn’t good at all. How are we going to perform on the field and in the classroom and in life if we struggle just to get out of bed in the morning?’”

Costes also reached out by writing an op-ed piece about mental health for D1Baseball.com, after admitting in a previous interview to having suicidal thoughts. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t eat. Success on the field didn’t bring happiness away from it.

“A couple days after it posted, I was getting messages on social media from kids quite literally from all across the country,” he said. “I got a message from a kid from Oregon, I got a message from a kid from Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Florida. There was a kid from New York, Montana, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio. When we went to the Big-10 tournament, even the coaches for the other teams were coming to me and saying they had their teams read my article.

“It takes a lot to be able to talk about that. Being able to step out and say, ‘This stuff is real,’ that’s going to help a lot more kids own up to how they’re really feeling. So, I was blessed that the University of Maryland is one of the leaders in that stuff. There are Division I programs that don’t have any sports psychologists on staff. Imagine what those athletes were feeling.”

Looking back on it, Costes believes he was dealing with depression and anxiety during his high school years. He just didn’t notice it as much in a more intimate setting.

“There were 100 of us in our graduating class,” he said. “I was always surrounded by my friends. Every class I had, there were a couple that I played football with or basketball or baseball. We’re all going to be close, we’re always going to be seeing each other. There were kids I didn’t play any sports with, but I had five classes with, and we’d get close because we’d end up studying together. I was always surrounded by people that I trusted, people I felt comfortable around. I’d wake up in the morning looking forward to going to school.

“When I got to Maryland, in four years, aside from the freshman fall, when I got my Gen Eds out of the way, I didn’t have any classes with any of my teammates. I would go to a 400-person lecture and not know anybody in there. Then, I’d have to miss discussion because of a practice or a game, or something else the athletes have to do. I didn’t have the buffer of being around friends in a support system 24/7.”

Costes went through a week period when he ate four meals, but still played at a high level. He’d sleep three or four hours a night, often walking the campus or just lying in bed and staring at the ceiling.

“All that anxiety, it pushed me more away,” he said. “I was like, ‘I don’t want my friends to see me this way.’ The friends that I had made outside of baseball, I didn’t want them to see that.”

An important step was telling Maryland head coach Rob Vaughn, who expressed his surprise at first because Costes was thriving as a freshman hitting in the middle of the order. The message came through loud and clear.

“I’m miserable and I don’t know what to do," Costes told him.

Vaughn and hitting coach Matt Swope got Costes in touch with head sports psychologist Dr. Michelle Garvin.

“That was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Costes said.

“The first meeting we had, she sat me down and she asked me, ‘Are you eating three meals a day and are you sleeping eight hours a night?’ And I said, ‘I’m not anywhere close to that,’” Costes recalled. “Then she got me hooked up with the head nutritionist at Maryland, Paula Karamihas, and even now she still randomly texts me and asks, ‘Did you eat enough today?’ I think the entire support staff at Maryland was good in helping me.”

This includes a daily survey app that requires Costes, who always answers honestly, to check how he’s feeling, his motivation to train. He responds using a scale. A strength and conditioning coach called him into the office after seeing that Costes wasn’t up to it, spending about an hour with him.

Costes didn’t take medication that was offered. He talked. He listened. And he learned more about his condition and walked through why he behaved in certain ways. He became educated on “automatic thoughts,” the negative self-talk that appears in response to certain stimulus. And “catastrophizing,” which caused him to spiral from the smallest incidents and fear what else might go wrong.

“I would feel like throwing up looking at the practice plan sometimes when I first started at Maryland. I wasn’t even in the locker room getting dressed yet and that’s what I was doing in my head. Getting to sit down with someone and having them point that out to me, and having them help me realize how outrageously ridiculous they were, it was something I needed to have explained because I never knew what that was before,” he said.

“They really do take it seriously there. I was helped, I was given help, and so I feel, ‘obligated’ is the wrong word, but it’s kind of the right word, to give that help back to someone else. That’s the only way things improve. When someone helps you, you go and help somebody else.”

Inspiration came unexpectedly on a night that Costes, while still at Gilman School, stumbled upon a FOX News program with host Laura Ingraham criticizing LeBron James and other NBA players for their outspokenness on the current political climate. Ingraham followed up a clip with a rant that closed with her telling them to “shut up and dribble.”

“I remember seeing that and I was like, of course I see myself as a baseball player, but baseball isn’t the only thing I do,” Costes said. “Even as a young high schooler, I knew that my sport is not what I am. At the very least, that’s where the spark in me came from."

The Orioles are making it possible for Costes to do more, to expand his reach as a professional baseball player. The ink dries on the contract, he heads down to Sarasota, and it all begins.

“This is a bigger platform for me to use,” he said.

“It’s one of those things, give back to the community that raised you up. If I’m doing great, making millions of dollars, how bad would it be for me to act like I didn’t come from where I come from? I don’t come from money, I don’t come from a lot. Those people that I grew up around, I owe it to them to try to help them.

“That’s really why I take this all so seriously. I was helped a lot, I was given a lot of help to get where I am today. A lot of people gave me time, effort, and resources to get here. At the very least, I owe it to them to help somebody the same way. Pay it forward. That’s the only way things get better.”