Keene State College senior Cody Dube has more than just family and friends coming to watch him take the mound for the Owls. Pitching at 96 miles per hour, Dube has multiple Major League Baseball scouts at every KSC game.
Dube has been playing baseball since he was about eight years old.
“I’ve pretty much played my whole life since then. I take the falls off, other than that it’s just all baseball,” Dube said.
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Dube is from Maine, and for the past two summers has been playing in the Sanford Mainers Collegiate Baseball League. Last summer, Dube said he got the chance to play in an all-star game with kids from all over. Unfortunately, the game got rained out, Dube said.
Despite this, the scouts still wanted to see what Dube and the other players had to offer. “The scouts wanted all the pitchers to throw bullpens afterward, so we just threw on the side, and I think there was a scout from every team there. Since then, I’ve just been getting letters and emails,” he said.
Dube wasn’t alone. He had lived with a friend who plays for the University of Southern Maine. “My friend got an email from the Atlanta Braves and I did too. So we lived together for the past two summers, then we both went down to a tryout in August. So it was kind of cool going through it with him,” Dube said.
Associate Head Coach and Pitching Coach Marty Testo put it simply when he said “Cody Dube loves baseball.”
He continued, “Cody is probably, well it’s cliché I guess, but he’s a model student athlete; he really is. In the sense, he’s done everything academically and athletically he could do here to be successful.”
Dube has grown since he’s arrived at Keene State, according to fellow senior pitcher Keith Simpson. Simpson said he has been alongside Dube since day one. “He’s probably one of my best friends here; he’s an extremely hard worker. He didn’t come in that way. He came in pretty average and then he worked his ass off to get to where he is today and he deserves every second of it,” Simpson said.
As a first-year, Dube played multiple positions, and said it wasn’t until sophomore year that he decided to focus on pitching. Testo said, “It was a hard decision on his part, many conversations between him and I, and when he made that commitment to just pitch, I think now people are really starting to see what this kid is capable of doing.”
Being looked at by scouts can put pressure on any athlete, but Dube keeps his composure and plays through the games. “The spotlight was something that came into our head early on, his first start in this year down in New Jersey there were three or four scouts there and when we were down in Florida there were 18,” Testo said.
He continued, “It’s always in the back of your head; you know how he’s going to take it. He never really worried about that, he worried about what was the matter at hand, ‘what I had to do to be prepared for today’, and that’s what he did.”
“He probably handled it [the spotlight] better than we did, because we were so excited and he was just kind of like ‘This is great but,’” Testo said. “Cody wants to win at Keene State before anything else.”
Shelby Iava can be contacted at siava@kscequinox.com
