Baseball or books? For Cotillo, it’s both

It’s final exam week at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but first-year student Chris Cotillo is feeling a whole other kind of pressure.

The part-time SB Nation baseball reporter is calling, texting and talking to the sources he’s cultivated over the past few years, trying to be the first to announce the latest Major League Baseball trades and signings.

As luck would have it for Cotillo, the busiest season in baseball player transaction news runs from November through January. As Cotillo studies for finals and finishes papers, he’s also cranking out tweets and stories for SB Nation, competing against the likes of well-known baseball writers like Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal and CBS Sports’ Jon Heyman.

“This time of year is insane, trying to balance finals studying with keeping up with the offseason,” Cotillo said. “It’s constant multi-tasking, I’m always on my phone while studying and trying to stay in the baseball loop as much as possible.”

From fan to reporter

Cotillo, who grew up in suburban Boston, has been a baseball fan all of his life, cheering in particular for the Red Sox. A few years ago, as a high school student, Cotillo created the Twitter account, @TradeDeadliner, and posted baseball news, rumors and transactions based on information from sports reporters. When it occurred to him that these sports writers were getting their information from various sources, he decided to try it himself.

He started collecting phone numbers and email addresses of baseball agents, managers and executives, and then made some cold calls.

“It was definitely intimidating talking to the big guys at first, the big players who I grew up rooting for, the general managers who I had only seen on TV before, agents who used to be players who I watched when I was little,” Cotillo said. “It has kind of been a process of getting them from larger-than-life figures down to people I can talk to and get information from.”

Cotillo, who now tweets from @chriscotillo, admits it was hard convincing some of them that he should be taken seriously and could be trusted.

“If you just tell them, ‘this is what I want to do and I am not going to take no for an answer’ they are usually willing to help you out eventually,” Cotillo said. “There have been a lot of people throughout the game who have been really gracious and have really helped me out with things.”

Making a name for himself

Cotillo’s big break came last December, when as a high school senior, he was the first to report two major baseball stories within a week of each other – that Ricky Nolasco would sign a $49 million contract with the Minnesota Twins and that the Detroit Tigers had traded Doug Fister to the Washington Nationals. Cotillo’s Twitter following increased by 10,000 followers in one week.

Shortly after that, he attended the annual Baseball Winter Meetings, where baseball executives meet for seminars and league and organization meetings. Journalists attend the meetings to write about the news, including player trades, from the event. Because of his age and the fact that he had beat others to report on those big stories, Cotillo found himself the subject of newspaper articles, including in the New York Times, and was interviewed on NBC Sports Radio and MLB Network’s Hot Stove.

“It really blew up bigger than anything I could imagine,” Cotillo said. (He wrote about the experience last January.)

Last summer, Cotillo was among on Business Insider’s list of “Most Impressive High-School Graduates.”

Cotillo’s editor at SB Nation, Justin Bopp, said what stands out about Cotillo is his relentless pursuit of every story and his ingenuity in finding ways to break a story that traditional media may have overlooked. Cotillo is a self-starter who knows how to navigate the backrooms of baseball and build trust in his sources, Bopp said.

“He takes all of that and delivers honest-to-goodness journalism that so many twice his age could only dream of,” Bopp said. “It’s mind blowing.”

Choosing Carolina

When it came time to choosing a college, Cotillo wanted to attend a university with a top journalism school. He narrowed his list to four schools, three of which were close to major baseball parks. Cotillo says baseball writer and UNC graduate Peter Gammons pushed him toward Carolina, and he hasn’t been disappointed.

“The baseball team here is great. The sports atmosphere is awesome and obviously the J-School is one of the best in the country. So it is definitely the right place,” Cotillo said.

“I love the school spirit and how involved everyone is,” Cotillo said. “Growing up going to games at Fenway, I thought that was the craziest and loudest it could possibly be, but I think being in the Dean Dome against Duke is going to be even better than a Red Sox-Yankees game at Fenway.