Life experiences have taught Shorebirds' Costello to roll with the punches

SALISBURY, Md. - Nearing the end of his first full professional season, Delmarva Shorebirds right-hander Michael Costello is aware of a variety of things. He can tell you which mounds in the South Atlantic League are kept up to snuff, which weather patterns might force him into an unexpected spot start and how long he'll spend on bus trips from one Sally League city to another.

Just don't ask the 24-year-old out of Manassas, Va., about his statistics. A 40th-round selection by the Orioles out of Post (Conn.) University in 2015 - the first player ever drafted from that school - Costello doesn't really pay a lot of attention to his numbers. Well, most of them at least

In fairness, they haven't been what he'd want. A 1-2 record with a 6.28 ERA in nine games (six starts) aren't particularly eye-opening, something the well-spoken Costello readily admits.

"I'm not a big numbers guy at all," he says after spending 45 minutes in pitchers' fielding practice drills at Perdue Stadium on a humid, 85-degree afternoon. "Honestly, don't even know what my numbers are. I know my ERA is up. WHIP and all that other stuff, I have no idea. Going into the season, the only stat I care about is walks. That's one thing I can control, keeping runners off base."

Dig a little deeper and you'll find that Costello has issued seven walks in nine outings this season. In his pro career, which started last season in the Rookie-level Gulf Coast League, he's walked 12 hitters in 18 appearances.

"Pretty much, going into every season, I want to have more starts or appearances than I do walks," he explains. "Some people kind of shake their head because that's pretty stout, but I did it last year in the GCL."

Costello lives in the present, a good trait for a guy who recently transitioned to the bullpen. He can shake off a bad outing or a rough stretch, figure out what the struggle can teach him and then move ahead with a readjusted game plan. He's a little older than some of his Shorebirds teammates, so he has some life experience to draw on, but his mentality has been formed by being the son in a Navy family, where his father moved frequently and Costello was counted on to pitch in to help in whatever way the family needed.

"Discipline-wise, it helps a lot - being on time, being professional, taking care what you have to do to make yourself better and get ready," Costello says. "I started earlier this year and now I'm in the bullpen. Something like that could have derailed someone who isn't as experienced as I am."

Life - and life's experiences - have shown Costello the importance of learning to roll with the punches. When he was 18 and a freshman at Radford University, he needed Tommy John surgery, and the ligament-replacement procedure cost him a year of college ball. He vividly remembers the 2-2 slider he threw to Virginia Tech's Andrew Rash on that Wednesday afternoon home game, which had been pushed back a day by rain.

"I felt it pop, I heard it pop," Costello recalls. "I was like, 'That's not good.' Felt pain, but your mind doesn't automatically go to the worst-case scenario. I tried to throw the 3-2 pitch, another slider, and it made it maybe 40 feet and rolled the rest of the way home. That's when the coaches and trainers came out and I didn't throw a baseball for five months."

By then, however, Costello was an old hand at weathering arduous recoveries from serious medical issues. When he was 14, and a freshman in high school after his family had relocated to Manassas from San Diego, he was sledding with friends on a neighborhood slope when the Boogie Board he was riding crashed into a tree. Costello got his bell rung and quit sledding for the day. Four days later, he finally went to the hospital with persistent neck pain only to discover that he had fractured his C-6 and C-7 vertabrae.

"I was shell-shocked. ... I sat in the waiting room for four hours when I got to the hospital," he says. "I wasn't bleeding, I wasn't dizzy or anything, so I just sat there. They took me back and took X-rays, and as soon as the X-rays were printed out and read, the whole place shut down. Everybody was in my room They put a neck brace on me, shot me up with a whole bunch of painkillers."

Three months later, he was out of a neck brace. Doctors didn't want to do surgery for fear of weakening neck muscles in a teenager who was still maturing physically.

"The recovery and rehab was much easier than the understanding that I was a quarter of an inch away from being paralyzed from the waist down or being dead," Costello says.

Costello recalls how his desire to return to baseball motivated him after the neck injury and following Tommy John surgery.

"The broken neck, the Tommy John, it already happened," he says. "Nothing I can do about it. But I can do something about the next step I need to take to make sure I can play this game again. That's how I've approached everything."

And he's been able to share his experiences to help his teammates, including pitcher Gray Fenter, who underwent Tommy John surgery earlier this season. Fenter, 21, was a seventh-round 2015 draft selection out of West Memphis (Ark.) High School who worked to a 1.66 ERA in nine games (eight starts) with the GCL Orioles in 2015.

"Gray Fenter was my roommate in the Gulf Coast League all last year and my roommate through spring training and extended when he had his surgery," says Costello. "He picked my brain about a whole bunch of stuff. 'Is this normal? Is that normal?' A couple of guys on the team have had it. When we were down in spring training, we were talking him through it. He'll be on a good throwing program before too long."

But his own injuries are in the past, and Costello is just happy to be pitching for the Shorebirds. He hasn't hit the dreaded wall some players run into the first time they play at a full-season affiliate. Nor does he expect to.

"I've yet to hit the wall and I don't anticipate it happening anytime soon," he says, matter of factly. "We keep it fun in the bullpen. I don't know how to explain it. We keep each other motivated and we push each other. ... You gotta have fun."

For as long as he can remember, all Costello has wanted to do was play baseball. He's living his dream.

"Growing up, the biggest punishment my mom would say was, 'If you don't get a good grade in this class, you're not playing baseball," he says. "Got it. That's all (the motivation) I needed."