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Part Two: New Trier Alumni in the Same Game Again

A friendship forged in high school baseball four decades ago crosses into the financial field.

This is the second of a two-part series about 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 story, Baumgarten explains how he got into his business while he still pitched for the White Sox.

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A baseball player with an inclination for The Wall Street Journal made for interesting banter in the baseball pit. Such was the fate of Ross Baumgarten at New Trier, and especially when he finally made it to the Chicago White Sox in 1978, a year after he was drafted in the 20th round out of the University of Florida.

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“I used to get all kinds of grief from coaches and managers and teammates, from high school on out, because I was always reading the Wall Street Journal, “ said Baumgarten, 56, now a vice president in private wealth management at Robert W. Baird and Co. in downtown Chicago.

Financial seed planted early

Baumgarten was dissecting stocks at a precocious age.

“My interest in this was from my father, Robert Baumgarten, who was an avid stock market investor,” he said. “He was one of those first guys who did discount brokerage, he made his own decisions, did his own research.

"He’d let me read research because I had some kind of interest. From reading all the research, I started making some decisions on an account he had for me. He’d give me three stocks, he didn’t care which one I’d pick," Baumgarten said of the seeds planted by his dad.

"I figured when I was done with baseball, I do this for other people,” he recalled thinking.

A left-handed pitcher with an abbreviated career, as Baumgarten had from 1978-82, could not have become independently wealthy. Baseball salaries had not yet exploded.

According to The Economic History of Major League Baseball by Michael Haupert, a big league players could expect to earn an inflation-adjusted real salary of $269,226 in 1978 and $456,250 in 1982. Haupert's report showed that the million-plus-dollar contracts did not kick in until 1991.

So when the White Sox southpaw got seven different opinions from seven different orthopedic specialists about an injured shoulder, he did not try to have surgery and wait a year or two to recover in the less-advanced era of sports medicine back then.

A starter in a different field

“I sent my resume out to a bunch of brokerage firms,” Baumgarten said.  “A couple of them responded.

He remembered the process: "You start a training program, study for the brokerage program, you pass as a broker.”

Baumgarten has worked for his current employer for three years, after an 18-year-stint with the William Blair & Co.

“I manage individuals’ personal retirement or pension/profit-sharing, and have accounts with hedge funds and money managers,” he said.

Amazingly, Baumgarten is in the exact same line of work as his former New Trier baseball teammate John Castino--they would eventually compete on opposing teams when Castino played for the Minnesota Twins in the American League. 

“It’s fabulous,” Baumgarten said when he learned Castino's Minneapolis-based financial services company was expanding to Chicago.

“John was and is one of the most talented guys I ever met. He was the star quarterback on the football team, star point guard on the basketball team that lost in the championship game in ’73, and star baseball player." the former pitcher recalled.

Like Castino, Baumgarten thinks government is the problem, not the solution, in kick-starting the economy to a higher growth rate.

“We [can] get back to a healthy environment when government becomes less a part of the equation and private enterprise a bigger part  of the equation," he said.

“We’ve become too Europeanized in which government has become too much a part of our economy. It’s choking the free-flow of money, the free-flow of ideas and the free-flow of business formation. Until then, we’re going to have problems with an economy that’s not going to grow as fast as it should," Baumgarten noted.

"When you have more private business formation, you’ll have a vibrant economy again,” he said.

Big break in high school

Baumgarten has gotten decades out of a business career compared to just five years in the majors. But even then, he got a lot of out of a very modest start at New Trier High School.

“I started very slow at New Trier,” he remembered of his high school playing days. “I was a very small kid as a freshman, on the B team. I still hadn’t grown much as sophomore.

"I broke my elbow and didn’t play as [a] junior. My senior year, I started on the junior-varsity, but one of the other [varsity] pitchers got off to a slow start and I did very well as J-V.

"I always thank coach [Ron] Klein as he was very flexible making the change, giving me a chance. It worked out OK,” Baumgarten said.

Coming up quickly from the minor leagues to a White Sox team run by a financially strapped Bill Veeck, Baumgarten was 13-8 with 3.54 ERA in 1979. In a rarity for baseball, he was one of four left-handers in the starting rotation along with Steve Trout (later a prominent Cub), Ken Kravec  and “Tex” Wortham. The next year, a fifth lefty, Britt Burns, joined the rotation while others’ workloads were cut due to injuries and ineffectiveness.

Baumgarten was 2-12 in 1980 and 5-9 in 1981 before the Sox traded him to the Pittsburgh Pirates during spring training 1982.  

He was 0-5 with Pirates in 1982 to wrap up his career at age 27.

"What happened is the change of ownership [to Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn], they felt we had too many lefties in their mind, started one by one peeling us off,” he said of the White Sox. “The only one they kept was Burns. A lot of us were considered part of the Veeck era. “

Strangely, Baumgarten did not get to know Reinsdorf, who then lived in neighboring Highland Park.

Reminders come in mail

Self-described as “ancient history” in baseball, the only reminder of Baumgarten's big league career are an average of 10 pieces of mail--baseball cards and other items--that he receives monthly requesting autographs.

He had the long-delayed surgery to fix a bone chip in his collarbone and a frayed tendon 10 years ago. “He fixed me up and I haven’t had an ounce of pain ever since,” Baumgarten said of the surgeon.

Although he grew up a Cubs fan and played for the Sox, he does not get out to either team’s ballpark anymore. “I never looked back,” he said.

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