Part One: New Trier Alumni in the Same Game Again

This is the first of a two-part series about Trevian alumni John Castino and Ross Baumgarten, baseball teammates under coach Ron Klein at New Trier in the early 1970s who went on to face each other in the majors: Castino as a Minnesota Twins third baseman and Baumgarten as a White Sox left-handed starting pitcher.  

Each did not have a long baseball career, but early on both Castino and Baumgarten made the transition to business as financial counselors. Castino stayed in the Twin Cities, but his business is expanding into the Chicago area. Baumgarten never left his native Glencoe.

In this first part, former three-sport New Trier star Castino tells how the process of helping himself out of a potential financial mess as a player, he developed his new career.

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Salaries hardly moved into the six-figure realm for players in the early 1980s, and a lot of rank amateurs, mixed in with some charlatans, foisted themselves as “investment advisers” on big leaguers. 

Players lost money as a result. But a few years after he shared American League Rookie of the Year honors as a Minnesota Twins third baseman with Toronto Bluejay shortstop Alfredo Griffin in 1979, John Castino stopped his own financial bleeding by taking matters into his own hands.

“Baseball was the strongest reason I turned to this area of financial planning,” said Castino, now a senior executive vice president and partner at Minneapolis-based Wealth Management Group. He turns 57 next month.

“I hired some knuckleheads out of Atlanta to manage some money for me," he recalled. “Fortunately I got rid of them soon enough. I’ve got a very blessed life. I went and got licensed myself in securities and insurance, to do my own investing.

Swinging into new career

"As soon as I was injured and my career was over, I went back to school to finish my undergrad degree. I got my masters at St. Thomas University in St. Paul," said Castino, whose playing days ended in 1984 because of a fused disc.

“Some family members asked me to do some stuff. Then my mom and teammates asked me. What started out as a hobby became a full-time career,” he said about how his career got rolling.

A 23-year veteran of financial counseling that includes a dozen years at Wealth Enhancement Group, Castino always has maintained strong family and social connections with the North Shore.

Now he’s adding a business connection.

His company is expanding into the Chicago area, announcing its entry into the market via radio ads.

“We’ll have people in Chicago providing services and meeting clients,” he said from his Minneapolis office.

Castino himself provides investment and tax-planning advice for individuals and companies’ 401K plans. But in recent years with the economic storms buffeting all investors, he has been as much an amateur psychologist calming the panicked as a numbers-cruncher and projector of future business trends.

“The basics are people need to take a step back from their investing decisions and stay disciplined,” Castino said. “People should not give up on stocks. They’re still the place to be.

"They need to be asset-allocation minded rather than [focused on] individual stocks. It’s a worldwide market out there, and you got to have the right research.

"[Investors have to] be nimble enough to move around to different countries, know when to play the U.S. market vs. international markets,” he said of the globalization of the business world.

Castino thought considerable growth could resume if political deadlock was untangled in Washington, D.C.

“The economy could heal itself and grow more quickly if some of the uncertainty could be wrung out of our political system,” he said. “You got extremes on both sides trying to do certain things. Compromise is a dirty word.

"Someone has to have the courage to take on both sides and figure out what’s fair with the tax system, and how much spending is the right amount of spending for a government.”

Castino sounds like a guy who makes a lot of sense and could translate that to high office. Sorry, but he’ll decline, knowing every last detail of life, no matter how innocent back in the day, becomes fodder for public scrutiny.

'You can’t be a kid anymore'

“I won’t run for office, and I’d never get elected because you have to tell about all the crap you did when you were younger," he said of American Graffiti-style hijinks.

“Stuff we did at , some was known, but I don’t think we’d be electable. Back then, you could get away with doing stuff. Now if you do some of this stuff, you get labeled.

"You can’t be a kid anymore. There’s so much pressure on these kids. You can’t do this, can’t do that,” he said about the social norms.

New Trier is famed for the pressure to succeed among the tradition of high achievers at the school.

But Castino developed a philosophy at a young age that governs him today.

“My friends and I didn’t feel that pressure,” he said. “We had a blast. You do what you’re good at, what you enjoy, do it to the best of your ability and have fun with it. If you have fun doing something with something in life, you’re going to be a lot better at it. You’ll put a lot of energy and passion into it.

“I only felt the pressure to be the best athlete I can be. The hard part was in the minor leagues, you’re on a bus, you’re playing every day, you have no time for anything. You can’t sit with a beer with your buddies at the corner bar. Look down deep, ask who are you, get [the] best of your ability.”

In addition to pitching and playing infield in baseball, Castino was the Trevians’ starting quarterback and point guard in basketball.

He names as “co-equals” the top influences on him in high school: baseball coach Klein, basketball coach John Schneiter and football coach Chick Cichowski.

"Each one of those coaches I loved for different reasons,” he said.

The quick lateral moves in basketball helped Castino years later as a third baseman. He hit .285 as a Twins rookie in 1979, then .302 in 1980. The following year, he led the American League in triples, hitting nine. Along the way, he got to face his former teammate Ross Baumgarten.

Facing that 'crafty lefty'

“A good friend, good guy, smart guy,” he said of his former southpaw teammate. “I really enjoyed playing against him with the White Sox.

"Ross was a crafty lefty, changed speeds well and came in on right-handed hitters. I did not have a lot of success against Ross,” Castino recalled of their encounters on the baseball diamond.

And it made sense that both have translated baseball into their present line of work.

"We’re pretty competitive and we like to do well. We’re self-starters, a lot of us are ambitious and we like to have a fair amount of uncertainty. How you gonna eat this year if you’re unsuccessful?" Castino asked.

“I like to help people for their retirement. That’s almost like hitting a home run,” he said.

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