Remembering one of Carter Counties Greatest Pitchers: Cody Marley
Published 10:40 pm Monday, October 8, 2018
C.Y. Peters
Over my many years of coaching three sports, I have had the pleasure of seeing some great athletes. Many went on to play in high school, college and some a little further.
One young man who was more determined to win more than any other I think I ever coached was Cody Marley.
In his Little League and Jr. Babe Ruth years, some would have called him a hothead, but I could see the “want to” in his eyes. We butted heads several times, and if I took him out of a game, he returned playing twice as hard as he did before. He would do whatever he could do to help the team win. It was never about Marley. He didn’t look for special awards, MVPs, or anything like that. He just wanted his team to win.
I first met Marley when he was playing Little League baseball for the American League. He was also a basketball player for Keenburg Elementary School. Teammates like Matt Rasnick and Josh Moore helped Marley to become a great basketball player, but his love was baseball. He wanted to pitch and control the game. If he was not on the mound, he loved to play shortstop, and he was so fast that he made one of the best outfielders in the league. Marley had a great swing and was a smart baserunner.
At the age of 12, I talked him into playing football. Marley loved to run back punts and kickoffs, he would get behind some big boys like Jeff Peters, Zack Coggins, Vic Deloach, and Blake Russell. I lost count of the touchdowns he scored that year but we only lost one game and had a great time. But Marley’s heart was all in for baseball.
Marley, Peters, and Franky Birchfield stayed at the Little League field and then on to Babe Ruth. Marley got to play in the 12-year-old Dizzy Dean league where his team finished third, and he picked up two wins from the mound. At 13, he played in the Amateur Youth World Series and the USSAA World Series, winning the first and finishing third in the USSSA.
In Babe Ruth, Marley played for the Giants coached by Charlie Bradford. The team competed strongly in the tournament each year. Marley was always on the all-star teams. One season while playing Dizzy Dean, they went 45-9 playing 17-games in 15 days.
One of Marley’s biggest games was during the state tournament being played in Johnson City. He threw the first three innings and then hit a triple. In the fourth inning, the team started hitting him because he was winded from running the bases on the big hit that had just given his team the lead. He left for right field until the final inning. Marley’s team had just taken the lead in the top of the inning and he wanted to go back on the mound. He said, “I got this.” He was sent out for the final three outs of the inning and showed why he was one of the best. He got all three batters out, allowing his team to win the state tournament championship.
Marley never cared where he hit in the line-up. Most players love the number four spot but Marley batted wherever you put him. Most of the time, he batted second or third in front of Nick Papantoniou and behind Jeff Peters. In his final years, J.D. Scalf was moved to the number four spot because he was always making contact with the ball. Marley rarely struck out. He, Scalf and Peters would put the ball in play somewhere. The hardest thing I ever got Marley to do was bunt. He always wanted to hit the ball hard. We had one game we were losing. The opposing team’s pitcher was just impossible to hit. We were down seven runs and nothing was working. After noticing the third baseman playing way back, I gave the first two batters the bunt sign. Neither the pitcher nor the third baseman covered the bunts. We had two players on base but was still way behind. Marley did not want to bunt, but he followed the signs. He laid down a perfect bunt on the first base line, the pitcher threw it over the head of the first baseman, and by the time they chased the ball down, Marley was on his way home. He couldn’t believe he had hit a home run on a bunt.
Marley’s mom and girlfriend were his biggest fans. I don’t believe they ever missed a game and if they did it was because of work. They were always there cheering him on. He went on to play high school baseball for Coach Payne at Elizabethton, and when Payne took the baseball job at Tennessee High, Marley followed him. His future looked great and he had several college coaches watching him. He was working hard for his future and spending most of his time in the batting cages and on the mound.
It was a sad weekend in early October 2007, Marley’s senior year, when he was thrown from a vehicle and killed. In his short life, he had built a lifetime of memories for his family, his teammates, his coaches, and his friends. I still think about Marley almost every day and I look back at the photos and think of the great times we had as friends, as a team. His baseball jersey number in Babe Ruth was retired the following season.