From the Pages of John Steinbeck to Mastering a Cutter-Slider: How A.J. Colarusso Left His Mark at Boston College

Pitching, at its core, is a mind game.

It tests one's ability to control, manipulate, and exploit the opponent with a mix of creativity, precision, and power.

Above all, the pitcher’s role is done with intense thought. Keeping the mind alert, letting it glide through an array of dilemmas and decisions in order to attack the batter, is just as necessary as executing the pitching action itself.

The best pitchers typically have an elite aptitude for decision-making, which also contributes to excellent leadership qualities.

For Boston College baseball pitcher A.J. Colarusso, these traits come rather effortlessly. Ultimately, they have served as a roadmap for the impressive career he has forged as a member of 'Birdball' — a legacy that will endure in the program's record books for as long as time lasts.

“Everything in which A.J. does, in terms of his preparation, from a development standpoint, and then even from a game-planning standpoint, he is by far the best I’ve ever been around,” said BC pitching coach Ryan Forrest. “He is extremely diligent about his routine and what he does. And when you put that together, it makes a really special athlete.”

On April 17, in a 11-1, run-rule blowout of Duke, Colarusso set the school record for most-career starts.

It was his 44th start overall, his 10th of the season, and he delivered an absolute gem, surrendering just one run on three hits and two walks while garnering four strikeouts in seven innings.

Up to 48 career starts now with 231.0 total innings under his belt — which puts him at No. 8 in the all-time career innings category, just a tad short of Kevin Shepard (236.2 IP) — Colarusso’s main objective is to put the Eagles in a position to win any time that he steps onto the mound.

In doing so, relentlessly pursuing every part of what makes a great pitcher excel is right at the heart of his focus.

“I just feel like I owe it to myself,” Colarusso said. “I owe it to my parents, and I owe it to my team to give it my all and to leave it out on the field every time I pitch, but also take every rep as seriously as I can in practice, in the weight room, and everything off the field, too.”

Photo Credit: Joe Sullivan / Boston College Athletics via bceagles.com — Joe Sullivan / Boston College Athletics via bceagles.com

Pitching is not the only activity that keeps Colarusso’s mind at work.

School is just as important to Colarusso as baseball is, and he treats education with a similar diligence.

“A lot of times we talk about [how] those two go hand in hand,” Forrest said. “Like, he has not missed a class. He does not have an unexcused absence in his time here at BC. He does everything he needs to do off the field, and then obviously it correlates to what he’s doing here, too.”

Colarusso said that he avidly reads fiction novels in his downtime — his favorite author is John Steinbeck — and he outlined a number of similarities between the art of pitching and the practice of analyzing literature.

Both require attention to detail, which manifests patience as a virtue, and both keep the brain spinning in search of a rhythm.

Finding that zone while coursing the pages of East of Eden draws comparisons to interpreting the body language of a batter 60 feet in front of him, according to Colarusso.

“When you talk about reading, it requires patience, and it requires you to put a lot of thought into something,” Colarusso said. “I think it’s fun to keep my mind going, and that’s kind of how I spend most of my nights outside of school. I think I kind of apply that to everything I do.”

Unlike reading, however, pitching is also dictated by results.

During his junior campaign, Colarusso was pulled from the Eagles’ rotation for the first time since being named a starter his sophomore year, and it left him distraught.

“Every start, I want to give my team a chance to win, and I frankly wasn’t doing that earlier that season,” Calousso said. “It really made me look inward and realize that I just needed to be more convicted in what I do. That conviction and every pitch that I throw now is really a product of that experience.”

Instead of succumbing to the internal negativity that resulted from his brief relegation to the bullpen, which bothered him immensely, Colarusso dug into a part of himself that only truly selfless individuals are even capable of doing.

“What I was most upset about was how I was just not performing for the team,” Colarusso said. “It wasn’t so much like I got pulled from the rotation. It really just boiled down to wanting to do the best for the team and helping us win.”

“I think I handled it well. Whenever I got an opportunity, which was thankfully still every weekend, I was just ready to compete and help us win games. And fortunately enough, I was able to get back into it.”

Colarusso's phrasing of "get back into it" is quite the undersell, even for an individual as humble as he is.

With a 4.18 ERA and a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 66:21 this season, he has reached an echelon that only a few players who have stepped through the program's doors can speak to, and his recognition by the league as a Third Team All-ACC selection attests to that.

In hindsight, that period of lackluster performance only morphed Colarusso into a fiercer competitor, and it even made him a better ambassador of the program than he already was.

For instance, Colarusso was voted to wear the esteemed No. 8 jersey in honor of Peter "Sonny" Nictakis, a former player who lost his battle with Hodgkin's disease in the summer of 2000.

Every year, that number is awarded to the player that most exemplifies Nictakis’ outstanding character, and it went without saying that Colarusso was the perfect match for it.

“I get emotional, because I’m proud to be wearing the jersey I’m wearing, even if I wasn't playing,” Colarusso said. “I just want to represent BC the best I can. That’s why I get so fiery and get competitive.”

It also enabled him to develop a new pitch, which Forest called a hybrid cutter-slider, into his four-pitch arsenal, which is not heavy in the sense of velocity, but leaves batters in a frustrating game of guesses in the box.

After laboriously fine-tuning his mix in the training facility with Forrest and the rest of the staff during the summer, that pitch has served as a bread-and-butter second option for Colarusso all season long.

“The way in which you make yourself a pitcher at the next level is being able to put three pitches in the zone,” Forrest said. “He has the ability now to put in four. So you can kind of see the success in which he’s had over the course of his career here just because he’s able to be unpredictable with his pitch mix.”

Realistically, only a few starts stands between Colarusso as a member of BC baseball and his future self, which could mean as a professional athlete.

The Eagles start their postseason journey as the fourth seed in the 2026 ACC Baseball Tournament, with play commencing at 3 p.m. Thursday in the quarterfinals, and Colarusso will look to build on his legacy-defining run.

Having just a small part in what has become a record-breaking season for the program is more than Colarusso could have wished for when he arrived as a freshman from Leominster in 2023.

But his role was far from a small one, and his legend continues to grow.

When asked about the senior class after BC’s final regular-season contest of the year on Saturday, head coach Todd Interdonato had just a few words to summarize what Colarusso has meant to the program.

“Like, I just feel so fortunate that I got to coach him,” Interdonato said.

Follow us on Twitter/X, Facebook, YouTube, Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram for the latest Boston College news.

Add us as a preferred source on Google