Colton Cowser still has the text, and for a while that was probably the safest way for the Orioles to reach him.
The phone call that was supposed to kick off his draft night came from a Houston number, and Cowser didn’t pick up. He was expecting a Baltimore area code, not another one of the spam calls that hit his phone all day. So he let it go, showed the number to a friend, and got the same advice back: don’t answer it.
By then, Orioles executive vice president Mike Elias had already tried to deliver the news that Baltimore was taking the Sam Houston State outfielder with the No. 5 pick in the 2021 draft. Elias ended up sending a text, introducing himself and asking Cowser to “a buzz.”
Cowser laughed about it yesterday, holding up his phone and pointing to the draft-night text, another message about an option, and a playoff celebration photo. That’s the full Elias archive.
“I was told the Baltimore Orioles were drafting me, so I was like anticipating a Baltimore area code phone number,” Cowser recalled yesterday. “Instead I got a Houston one, and I was like, well, I’m not gonna answer.
I get so many Houston calls because my area code is Houston. I get so many spam calls a day.
“I showed my friend, and he’s like, ‘Don’t answer that.’ So I was just like, ‘I’m not gonna answer that.’”
The joke is easy now. At the time, Cowser had no clue Baltimore was about to call his name.
He said he didn’t really know where he was headed until pick three, when his agent texted him that the Orioles were drafting him. Before that, there had been no Zoom call, no real back-and-forth with the club.
Baltimore did bring him in for a pre-draft workout about 10 days earlier, and that visit gave him a chance to meet Elias and a couple of scouts.
“It went well, and here we are,” Cowser said.
The night itself turned into a family-and-friends gathering, with one extra layer of draft-day weirdness. Cowser celebrated alongside pitcher Ty Madden, his high school teammate, who was selected 32nd by the Tigers out of the University of Texas.
“He was actually supposed to get picked before me and ended up going after me,” Cowser said. “We did a little draft party together.
We went to high school together. Had some of our high school friends, college friends from both schools, and both our families, so that was cool.”
Cowser said he doesn’t rub it in.
“It was a long night because for whatever reason he ended up dropping in the draft,” Cowser said. “Really cool night, though.”
The Orioles’ selection of Cowser fit the range many expected. He was projected to go somewhere between picks 10 and 16, but the pre-draft interest started to narrow the gap. He worked out with the Royals, who held the seventh pick, and the Diamondbacks at No. 6 also reached out.
“So all of a sudden, picks five, six and seven reached out, and my agent was like, if something were to happen, you’d be under slot there,” Cowser said. “And that’s what happened.”
Even now, the draft still pops into his head when the anniversary rolls around. The buildup before it? Not so much.
“I just feel like there’s so much going on in the present day,” he said. “I think when draft day comes around, like yeah, I think about when I got drafted, but I don’t think really leading up to it.
It’s more so just a little blimp on the radar of, like, ‘Oh, today’s draft day. I remember when that happened.’
But I’d say only really on the specific day rather than what leads up to it.
“It was awesome, dream come true. It was one of those things that the anticipation, the buildup, the whole prior year and couple years leading up to that, and being able to almost like breathe a little bit after getting drafted, and then realizing, OK, now it’s come to get going, this was a really good feeling. I don’t really think there’s anything that you can emulate in your life to describe it.”
And even with the spoiler from his agent, Cowser said the moment still landed.
“I think it was cool to know,” he said. “But I definitely missed Mike’s phone call.”
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