Greatest baseball players: Was this Rockford's best-ever all-around athlete?

Editor's note: This is another entry in the Rockford Register Star's exploration of the area's greatest athletes since the end of World War II. We have picked the greatest players in multiple sports like football and basketball. This is the 10th in our baseball series. Links to previous stories are below.

Frank DeCastris was not the greatest all-around athlete in NIC-10 history.

But that may only be true because he played for St. Thomas, a 350-student all-boys school forerunner of Boylan, which joined the NIC-10 four years after he graduated. St. Thomas played in the SHARK conference with future NIC-10 teams Harlem and Hononegah. Forty years before Matt Weber was first-team all-conference in baseball, football and basketball for Boylan, DeCastris was elite in five sports, shoe-horning track and golf around his baseball schedule in the spring.

“He was the best all-around athlete I ever saw in my life,” said Mike Tulley, the former long-time president of the Rockford Pro-Am golf event who graduated from St. Thomas in 1960, one year before DeCastris. “He was the top of every sport. In football, he played quarterback, he played halfback, he kicked off and he punted. He could dunk the basketball when no one was dunking the basketball. Baseball spoke for itself.

"He could have had scholarships in basketball, baseball, football and track. He was also a good bowler and a good golfer. He still is a good golfer.”

Notre Dame football wanted him

DeCastris turned down a football scholarship to Notre Dame. “I thought I was too small. Football wasn’t my future at 165 pounds,” he said. Instead, the 6-foot DeCastris, who averaged 27.5 points his senior year, signed to play basketball for St. Bonaventure but left after one semester when coach Eddie Donovan left to become coach of the New York Knicks. Instead, four years before the Major League Baseball Draft began, he signed with the Cleveland Indians for $50,000.

"They say Frank DeCastris was a man among boys," former longtime Freeport baseball coach Dan Humay said. "He could have been on WWW Smackdown."

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DeCastris never made it to the majors, but had 1,056 hits in 12 years in the minors, 41 more in a final season in the Mexican Leagues, and is our choice as one of the outfielders on Rockford’s all-time baseball team of the last 75 years.

“I really wanted to go to college — I wanted to be a dentist,” said DeCastris, who turns 80 in June. “It just didn’t work out for me. A lot of people say I was better in basketball than I was in baseball, but I decided baseball was the best bet.”

Cleveland outbid the Yankees ($42,000) and Dodgers ($39,000) for DeCastris. They also had a local connection: Belvidere native Fred Schulte, who played centerfield in the majors from 1927-37 and is the only Rockford-area MLB position player other than Boylan’s Jake Smolinski in the last 90 years, still lived in Belvidere and was the Cleveland scout who signed DeCastris.

Cleveland had another edge, too.

“The reason I signed with Fred is Cleveland had the least amount of minor league teams,” DeCastris said. “I thought that was my way to get to the majors.”

His past as a multi-sport athlete

DeCastris ran the hurdles in track and also golfed when he could fit it into his baseball schedule at St. Thomas.

“Back in those times with a school that didn’t have that many kids, it’s hard to field a team,” said DeCastris, a low-handicap golfer who has won three Rockford City Senior golf titles. “We didn’t have swimming or soccer, but I played five sports. I didn’t have enough time to go to the practices, but I intertwined track and golf with the other sports.”

DeCastris got his lifelong nickname — “Chico” is a nickname for a little boy in Italian — from his uncle Nick Giorgi. He also got much of his early sports education from his Uncle Nick.

“He taught me everything I knew about baseball,” DeCastris said. “We worked on it quite a bit in high school and even in grade school. He also taught me everything there was to know about football and basketball. I have a lot to thank him for being the athlete I was.”

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Although DeCastris has more hits than any minor leaguer in Rockford history, he was always known even more for his defense in center field.

“I took a lot of pride in defense,” he said. “At one time a newspaper report about the Philadelphia Phillies said I was the best outfielder they had and I had the strongest arm they had ever seen. Defense was never a problem with me.

“I took a lot of pride in throwing people out on base. I used to throw behind runners a lot, especially at first base. We had a play where the catcher would back up the first baseman. The runners would make a wide turn and they wouldn’t know the ball was already in the air.”

DeCastris was even known for his defense in high school.

"I watched DeCastris play a million times," said Don Tresemer, a longtime former coach at several local schools, most notably Harlem. "He played with the Rockford Blackhawks in the summer time. He was unbelievable defensively. He had a great arm and he would catch anything hit to the outfield. He was unreal. He made some of the best throws I've ever seen.

"He couldn't hit a curveball, though."

At least not early in his career.

Road through pro baseball

DeCastris started out in Class D ball in the days when there were far more minor league levels. He jumped to Single-A in his third season, but didn’t reach Double-A except for a short 11-game stint until his seventh season at age 25. That’s because he never really broke through as a hitter until he was 24, when he hit .278 with 18 homers, 78 RBIs and 100 runs scored at Single-A.

He moved up to Double-A the next two seasons but hit only .203 and .206. He then had another breakthrough, batting .256 with 8 home runs and 50 RBIs in his first season in Triple-A in 1969, his last year with Cleveland.

He was even better in 1970 after getting picked up by the Phillies, hitting a career-high .288 with a career-high 20 homers and doing so in Triple-A, with 60 RBI and 82 runs scored as a leadoff hitter.

But he may have been too old by then. He was 28 his first year with Philadelphia, when he was the last cut in spring training. The Phillies chose to keep a 20-year-old Oscar Gamble over DeCastris, and Gamble would go on to play 17 years in the Majors.

DeCastris was traded to the Reds the next year. He said he could have made it to the majors there but had a lackluster season in Triple-A, batting .240 with seven home runs. After that, he moved to the Mexican Leagues and retired in midseason two years later after a fan shot a gun into the outfield during a game in Culiacon. A similar incident happened later in Mexico City and DeCastris chose to retire on the spot and come back to Rockford at age 31.

“Still, I was very blessed,” DeCastris said in a Register Star story nine years ago. “A lot of people want to play that game and didn’t have the talent or the breaks to play that game. I was fortunate enough. Baseball was my first love, and I got to play something for fun. It was a fun game.”

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DeCastris still has fun with baseball. He used to attend Cleveland Indians reunions. When Cleveland stopped planning them a decade ago, DeCastris took over. DeCastris, who started out with the Indians at Class D Dubuque, Iowa, along with future MLB stars Tommy John and Tommy Agee and once roomed with Lou Piniella at Selma, Alabama, will hold his latest reunion this summer.

“Cleveland used to do the big one, but they haven’t done it for a long time,” DeCastris said. “We are all getting older, so I decided to get a few guys together. We do it every three years. We get 30 or 40 guys together.”

Matt Trowbridge is a Rockford Register Star sports reporter. Email him at mtrowbridge@rrstar.com and follow him on Twitter at @MattTrowbridge. Sign up for the Rockford High School newsletter at rrstar.com.

About this series

The Rockford Register Star has been writing about the greatest area athletes in various sports since the end of World War II. Previously, we have picked the greatest players in football, boys basketball, girls basketball, boys tennis, girls tennis, boys golf and girls golf, as well as greatest games in football, boys basketball and girls basketball.

Their entire careers, spanning from high school to the pros, is considered, but only players from schools that are in the newspaper's current coverage area are considered, so players such as catcher Gene Lamont of Kirkland and pitcher Seth Blair of Rock Falls were not eligible. For baseball, we picked nine position players and four pitchers. All players were picked by sportswriter Matt Trowbridge with input from NIC-10 History Blog author Alex Gary and local coaches. Players who were used at several positions during their career were placed where they fit best on this team. One player will be revealed each day.

Pitcher: Drew Dickinson, Freeport

Pitcher: Dan Scarpetta, Auburn

Catcher: Nick Shields, Harlem

First base: Matt Dettman, Auburn

Second base: Sean Lyons, Byron

Third base: Andrew Wilhite, Stillman Valley

Shortstop: Jake Smolinski, Boylan

Outfield: George Feeley, West

Outfield: Rodney Myers, East

Outfield: Frank DeCastris, St. Thomas

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Greatest Rockford baseball players: Frank DeCastris stars in 5 sports