Caleb Cockerham finished up his senior season at Lenoir-Rhyne by competing in the Division II baseball championship. - Joel Krenz

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By Jay Spivey

For the Clemmons Courier

Most athletes just want to have the chance of going out on top.  

For Caleb Cockerham, a former baseball player at West Forsyth, he almost did that earlier this month.

Cockerham, who just finished his senior season at Lenoir-Rhyne, competed in the NCAA Division II baseball championship at the USA Baseball Training Complex in Cary. The championship, which featured Super Regional winners, was double elimination. Lenoir-Rhyne won its first two games against East Stroudsburg and Central Missouri, but it lost two straight games to Central Missouri, ending its season at 50-15. Central Missouri, however, advanced to the best-of-three national championship and lost to Tampa in three games. 

“It was a sweet way to finish the careers, playing as long as we could and just having a lot of fun together” Cockerham said. “And that was the main thing.”

Central Missouri won the last game 14-10, ending what was a magic carpet ride of a season for Lenoir-Rhyne.

“You can be upset because the season’s over, because you’re done playing with these guys, but you can’t be upset about the season that you had,” Cockerham said. “I think that it opened everybody’s eyes, here’s looking back at what a crazy season we had and just how much fun we had. And then the only sad part about it is it’s over.”

For the Bears, it started last summer with an influx of new players.

“We brought in 30 guys, a bunch of talent,” Cockerham said. “It was definitely the most talented team. We’ve always had talented teams in the past. It’s just whether or not we could put it together. And this year it just seemed like everybody got along and we put everything together really well and it showed.”

In what turned out to be his final game as a college baseball player, Cockerham, who was converted to a pitcher after playing outfield for most of his high school career at West Forsyth, pitched the final 1 1/3 innings on June 5 and finished with no strikeouts or walks and he gave up two hits.

“It was crazy,” he said. “We talked about not having a lot of chances all year coming into the very last game I hadn’t thrown in about a month. And I came into the game in the seventh inning, and we were losing still, and I probably had my best outing in my college career.  

“So, just walking off the field it was just surreal.” 

Although Cockerham has faced injuries in his college career, his lack of chances at pitching had more to do with circumstance than anything else.

“When you’re in the regional postseason schedules allow you to have your best guys on the mound all of the time,” he said. “So, you’re not really put in games — you’re not really put in a situation, especially where we were winning games in a row. We weren’t putting ourselves in bad spots. You’re not really playing two games on a day, so you don’t have to have a whole lot of pitching, a whole lot of depth. You can just roll out the same guys every day and that’s just how it works.”

Now that Cockerham has had some time to reflect on his career, there was some disappointment. According to lrbears.com, Cockerham finished this season with a 1-2 record with a 9.00 ERA in seven innings pitched over 11 appearances. He gave up eight runs, seven earned, and had 13 walks and nine strikeouts. 

“Personally, I felt like I got my chances, and I didn’t really prove anything,” he said. “Then, I just played my role, everybody’s got a role no matter what that role is, big or small. It can be anything, but I feel like I played my role, and that’s just how it worked out.” 

In retrospect, it might have been really hard to achieve his ultimate goal. 

“Expectations are to be perfect,” Cockerham said. “But, it’s impossible to be perfect, so you always want to do really good, just because of passion. Everybody wants to be perfect when you’re out there, but that’s not how it’s going to work. Just going out and competing and having fun is kind of what you’ve got to do. So, that’s what I feel like I did.”

Cockerham, a left-hander, listed at 5-foot-8 and 180 pounds, knew what his job was. 

“Going into the season my role was a matchup guy, the left-on-left matchup,” he said. “And I started out the season that way, then in the middle I was not in that role. And in the end, I got that role back again. So, that’s a role that I knew I was not going to get 45 innings out of the pen, or 50 innings out of the pen, doing that role. But I knew I was going to have a job and give us a real chance to win, one chance to help out.” 

The season started in early February, but the evolution of the Bears started last fall with Coach Adam Skonieczki and his coaching staff.

“You have meetings at the end of the fall,” Cockerham said. “You play all fall. You have meetings and they kind of give you a role. If it’s a bad role you can either accept it and not try to get better. If it’s a bad role you can work harder to take somebody else’s role, or if it’s a good role you’ve got to work to keep that role.”

Disappointed in his first three years with the Bears, Cockerham was motivated to prove to himself and the doubters, if there were any, what he could do as a pitcher.

“Coming into this year, I felt like I had my best stuff,” he said. “I felt like I had my best chance to perform, and I just had one hiccup that kind of ruined the whole thing numbers-wise. But other than that, I felt really good out there. I felt really good.”

The irony is that Cockerham believes that his best statistical season, his freshman season, was not his best. In his freshman season in 2021 when the Bears finished 46-13, Cockerham, according to lrbears.com, finished with a 1-0 record and a 2.35 ERA over 17 appearances and 15 1/3 innings. He gave up five runs, four earned, with 22 strikeouts and 11 walks.  

“I got bailed out a few times,” he said. “And other years I felt like I got unlucky. It’s just baseball. It’s just how it is. Numbers don’t tell it all, but you know, it is what it is.”

It all goes back to his time at West Forsyth when Cockerham was just looking for an opportunity to play college baseball. According to him, the only other opportunity to play in college beside Lenoir-Rhyne, which is in Hickory, was at Carolina University in Winston-Salem. 

“I didn’t really think staying super-close to home was what I wanted to do,” he said. “But L-R gave me a chance to pitch. I’d never pitched before, but it was something I was willing to take a chance for, and if it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out. But it seemed to work out, so I had a lot of fun doing it.” 

According to Cockerham, the only time he had ever pitched in a game was his senior year at West Forsyth when he pitched against Reagan.

“We were just at one of the prospect camps at Hickory High School, and they didn’t have enough pitchers to fill the spots to do live scrimmages, so I was just like, ‘I’m going to give it a shot.’”

Some eyeballs were opened and the metrics used in Trackman were what the Bears were looking for in a pitcher.

“I think the same as a lot of younger guys is any way you can keep playing no matter what that is you just keep playing,” Cockerham said. “So, that’s kind of been my motto the whole time. So, even if I’m not throwing in every game, this was my way to keep playing. So, it gave me four more years of baseball. I can’t complain about it.”

It sure did.

“As a baseball player everybody knows how to throw, right?” Cockerham said. “But you’ve got to learn to pitch. So, you’re practicing 5-6 days a week all throughout the fall. Pitching, it’ll come. You’re just out there throwing until you learn to pitch.

“It took me a couple months to get comfortable. And then from there on you learn little things along the way that turned me into more of a pitcher. But I think anybody could get up there and pitch. It’s just up there throwing. That’s how it is.” 

Cockerham quickly understood what his job was.

“I could throw three times in one week or I could not throw for three weeks,” he said. “So, just being ready and whenever you get the chance is pretty much how my whole college career’s been. You never know when you’re going to get the chance, but when you get it take it and run with it.”

The one nagging issue for Cockerham has been an arm injury that he suffered at the end of the fall of his junior season at Lenoir-Rhyne.

“(Last year), I had a partial tear in the UCL (ulnar-collateral ligament in his elbow) and didn’t have surgery on it,” Cockerham said. “I missed the first two months of that season. And then came back, felt kind of bad, but I was just pitching to pitch. Velo was down, arm was still hurting, but with summer ball my arm stopped hurting. I came back this year and felt like everything was kind of in sync and I was going to feel good and just keep playing.”

According to Cockerham, the UCL was torn about 20 percent, so he elected to not have Tommy John surgery to repair the ligament. Instead, he chose to strengthen the muscles around the elbow and forearm, as well as the muscles around the rotator cuff and the front of the shoulder, over about a 12-week period of rehab.

“If you’re a pitcher you know you’re going to have arm pain no matter what,” he said. “It’s just how it is. You’re going to throw sore, you’re going to throw hurting. It’s just when you cut yourself off and get help.  

“But I think that when I came back from it, I just wanted to throw that season. I didn’t want to take the season off. So, the pain wasn’t terrible. It was manageable to where I could keep throwing.” 

His comfort level picked up over summer ball with the Asheboro ZooKeepers in the Coastal Plains League last summer.

“I took about two weeks in between (seasons), and I felt like that kind of gave me a little relief,” Cockerham said. “And I got 35, 40 innings or whatever it was last summer in the CPL and felt really good. I just took it easy in the fall. I felt good all season.” 

That leads to now. Even though his college career is over and he’s graduated from Lenoir-Rhyne, he was scheduled to report to Asheboro in the CPL again this past Tuesday to pitch until early August.

“I’m going back to school. I’m going back to grad school at Lenoir-Rhyne still (for two years),” Cockerham said. “I’m going to get my master’s in occupational therapy. So, I’ve got this summer until I go back to school, so I’m just going to have a little fun, play ball a little bit, and just do my thing.”