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Dom Amore: How Ian Cooke re-committed, and rediscovered his mojo for NCAA-bound UConn baseball

STORRS — The day after UConn’s 2023 baseball season ended in Gainesville, Fla., coaches began their “exit” meetings, giving players their thoughts to take into the offseason.

When they sat down with Ian Cooke, who had started the season as the ace and fallen off, it nearly became a true farewell.

“We had the tough ones scheduled for the morning,” Coach Jim Penders said. “We told him, ‘listen, we are failing you as coaches, because we are not seeing improvement. Maybe you need different voices. We are not doing a good job with you and we will help you find that place, if that’s what you want to do.'”

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Cooke sat on it, slept on it, talked it over with his family. He was convinced the coaches wanted to light a fire under him, and it worked.

“I didn’t think they wanted me to leave and I didn’t really want to leave at all,” Cooke said. “I love it here. … It was really an eye-opening moment. ‘Hey, I needed to figure out my own stuff right now, and the sooner I figure it out, the better it’s going to be.'”

So Cooke walked into Penders’ office the day after the team got back and told him he wanted to stay, that his struggles were on him, not the coaches, and he would re-dedicate himself to conditioning, studying, to becoming the pitcher UConn envisioned when he came from the Canterbury School in New Milford. And he went to work on his body, his arm, his mindset.

How’d he do? The Big East Pitcher of the Year, Cooke is starting the Huskies’ NCAA Tournament first-round game against Duke on Friday in Norman, Okla, at 1 p.m.

“He can be so dominant,” Penders said. “He’s one of the most talented pitchers in the country. When his stuff is on, he’s unhittable. I told him during the course of the season, ‘the only guy who can beat you, is you.'”

And therein hangs a good part of this tale. Cooke throws a slider his teammates call “the dark, insidious elixir,” which suggests something creepy and malevolent. Self-doubt can be dark and insidious, too.

A righthander, 6 feet 1 and 249 pounds, Cooke began the season with a strong effort, six scoreless innings against Louisville in the opener, then struggled again and was out of the rotation as the team began playing in the northeast. The turning point came April 12, when he came out of the bullpen in the second inning against St. John’s at Elliot Ballpark. Cooke threw 7 2/3 scoreless innings, struck out 14, jumping, screaming, pumping his arms furiously as he finished the game with a flourish.

“A year and a half of frustration left me,” Cooke said. “I’m not usually an emotional pitcher. I do pitch with emotion but I usually don’t let it come out, let people see it a whole lot, but the year and a half before that was definitely hard, messing with my head a lot and I just really couldn’t pitch with a clear head.”

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With some help from a psychologist with sports experience, Cooke had learned some devices to handle whatever came his way on the mound. If someone gets a weak hit, for instance, he’ll go behind the mound, pick up the rosin bag and throw it down, “sort of like throwing away the bad stuff,” he says.

Cooke might stare out at center field and take a deep breath. Off the field, he uses a form of meditation in the form of 12-minute videos.

“It seems to be working,” Cooke said.

In Big East play, he pitched 43 1/3 innings with a 2.70 ERA and 61 strikeouts.

“His freshman year, he was unreal,” said Matt Garbowski, the Huskies’ catcher from New Fairfield. “Then last year, he just didn’t look like himself. This year, on the mound, he was himself and I love catching him. Now, he’s the real Ian.”

Cooke was 7-1 with a 3.64 ERA as a freshman, starting midweek games, he turned in big-time performances, 7 2/3 innings of three-hit ball to win at Southern California, eight innings of one-hit ball to win at Boston College. So he was counted upon to anchor the staff as a sophomore, but pitched only nine games with a 5.67 ERA.

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“I feel like freshman year, I had blind confidence,” Cooke said. “You know, you’re in high school, especially if you’re going Division I as a pitcher, you’re throwing 88 MPH or faster, you can throw right down the middle and you’re going to get a lot of swings and misses, so I had kind of that negligence. Now, I’m somewhere with real competition and you’re going to get hit hard once in a while. I really didn’t get hit hard until my sophomore season, and that’s where my confidence started to diminish.”

“I started to really realize I was at a high level of baseball and it turned into a cruddy season. In my own head, I was beating myself up, ‘you’re not good, you don’t deserve to be here.’ But this year, I’m a little cocky in my own head. In baseball, you’ve got to be a little cocky, hold yourself to a higher standard than anyone else.”

MLB scouts have been watching Cooke, and a few teams have reached out. He has been throwing in the mid-90s with the slider for which teammates have their name, and Penders calls something unprintable here. He also mixes in an occasional change-up.

Cooke will have to summon all of his repertoire, and all he has learned about himself and the craft of pitching when he takes the mound against Duke (39-1), the ACC tournament champion. No time for negative self-talk, no time for getting in one’s own way.

“I’m glad I figured it out,” Cooke said. “It does such that I didn’t figure it out ’til this season, four or five weeks into the season, but better to figure out then than not figure it out at all.”