New Chatham Manager ‘Glad To Be Back’

CHATHAM – New Chatham Anglers manager Dennis Cook’s coaching background is a veritable trip around the world. 

Baseball has brought Cook to Poland, Sweden and Dubai. He’s coached for the German and Italian national teams, and stateside, in Evanston, Ill. and Greeneville, Tenn. And now, the latest stop on Cook’s itinerary is a return to Chatham, where he served as Anglers pitching coach from 2018 to 2022.

He steps in to lead a team that due to two midseason resignations has had four different managers the past two summers. The hiring of Cook, a former big leaguer, was announced last August, a week after Chatham had played in the Cape League postseason for the first time since 2019. The Anglers have started 1-2 this season.

A University of Texas alum, Cook, 62, said he “missed being up here.”

“I’m glad to be back,” he said. “This is a good league. The weather is great for the most part. I get out of the heat in Texas and we get to see good baseball, so it’s a good combination of things.”

Outside of Cook’s time in Chatham, formerly as pitching coach under Tom Holliday or now as manager, he’s coached for the Polish, Swedish, German and Italian national teams and the Mid East Falcons, an Abu Dhabi-based franchise within an incipient Middle Eastern pro league called Baseball United. 

Earlier this year before one of that league’s first games, Cook stood on the third baseline in a Dubai ballpark watching a ceremonial first pitch from Saudi Baseball and Softball Federation CEO Abdulrahman Alshehri. The day before, a U.S. Army major general threw a first pitch to Albert Pujols. Cook’s Mid East Falcons team included former Red Sox Alejandro De Aza, Pablo Sandoval, and Rusney Castillo. 

“I love teaching the game, and I’ll teach it anywhere, and I also love traveling,” Cook said. “When I was a kid, we didn’t get to travel a whole lot, and I always wanted to. I always wanted to see the world, and I get to see the world and doing what I love most, and that’s teaching baseball.” 

He’s also coached at Northwestern University and managed the Greeneville Flyboys of the collegiate Appalachian League. Baseball is baseball, he said. The fundamentals apply to the college kids playing on Cape Cod just as much as they do to the amateurs playing in Sweden or the former major leaguers playing in the United Arab Emirates.

Before he had ever come to Chatham or globetrotted as a coach, Cook pitched in Major League Baseball for 15 seasons. A left-hander, he played for nine different teams and threw more than 1,000 innings, winning the 1997 World Series with the Florida Marlins and playing in the 2000 Series with the New York Mets. Across 16 and a third career postseason innings, Cook didn’t allow a single run. 

He said he’d coach the same way even if he had never played in the major leagues.

“We try to keep it fun and aggressive and as professional as we can with the kids,” Cook said.

The Anglers begin the summer with a pair of MLB draft-eligible players headlining the roster in Virginia outfielder Henry Ford and Georgia right-handed pitcher JT Quinn.

“They’re all good players, so I’m excited to watch them play and compete, and this is a great opportunity for them, and I want to make sure that we stress that as coaches,” Cook said. “That this is an opportunity not everybody gets, so take advantage of it.” 

Cook leads a team that — at the start of the Cape League season — had never met him before and that he, though he’s been recruiting the players since last August, had never met either. He’s been through that across three continents, as a coach walking into new groups of people he doesn’t know, and has become more comfortable with it. 

They relate through baseball, he said. It’s the same in Chatham — just probably with less of a language barrier.