Don Cooper, pitching great at NYIT and famed pitching coach for the Chicago White Sox, dies at 70

Bob Hirschfield was texting with Don Cooper recently. They were close friends, having known each other for decades, bound together from their baseball ties forged in Old Westbury.

And then Hirschfield, the longtime former coach at New York Institute of Technology, got the news Wednesday. Cooper, the former pitching great for NYIT and famed pitching coach for the Chicago White Sox, had died Tuesday at age 70 in Brentwood, Tennessee. A cause of death was not released.

“We just communicated the other day,” the 78-year-old Hirschfield told Newsday Thursday from Florida where he now lives. “And then all of the sudden, boom, he’s gone. It’s like, My God. It’s like a shock.

“… Even [Wednesday] night, I’m laying in bed and thinking about all the different things with Donnie and myself, the people we worked with at New York Tech and New York Baseball Academy in the winter and the summer and all the different things he was involved in . . .  We became close because he became involved with all my instructional programs.”

Cooper was from Maspeth, Queens. He played baseball and basketball for Monsignor McClancy in the borough, then was the ECAC Player of the Year for NYIT as a senior in 1978 before signing as a Yankees 17th-round pick. He pitched mostly as a reliever for three big-league teams over four seasons, including the 1985 Yankees.

He won only one major league game before joining the White Sox organization as a minor-league pitching coach in 1988. Cooper will always be known for his work with Chicago’s major league staff from 2002 through 2020, winning a World Series in 2005. His pitchers threw four no-hitters, including a perfect game by Mark Buehrle, and he coached 11 different All-Stars.

“Coop was one of a kind and taught me so much about pitchers, pitching, and their mindset,” Ozzie Guillen, the manager from 2004 through 2011, wrote on X.

But Cooper also left his mark on Long Island by staying close to the NYIT program and giving pitching lessons at the college to kids ages 7 to 17 for New York Baseball Academy, which was founded by Hirschfield and his wife, Rita.

“Going back to when he was just starting out as a coach in the White Sox organization, he would come in for weekend after weekend and do the pitching workshop at New York Tech and a summer camp; we had a pitching workshop for the New York Baseball Academy,” Hirschfield said. “That was sold out. We had like 250 kids. We worked for 10 straight hours on Sunday.

“He would come in even during the year. The All-Star break, he’d fly in to make a visit to the summer program. He would show up at alumni games. And he maintained communication. He was very close to his teammates at New York Tech.”

Hirschfield grew up in Lakeview, played at St. Agnes in Rockville Centre and St. John’s and won 668 games coaching NYIT from 1982 through 2011. He and Cooper are NYIT Athletics Hall of Famers. Hirschfield arrived as the pitching coach at the college in 1978 just after Cooper left.

“He was a guru of pitching,” Hirschfield said. “He talked about pitching for hours.”

So why was Cooper such a good pitching coach?

“No. 1, his ability to relate to players,” Hirschfield said.

Cooper is survived by his wife, Ruby, and three children, Jaime, Luke and Kate. They issued a statement on Facebook that mentioned Cooper’s “unbreakable love for his family and friends.”

Nick Melito also knew him as someone who cared.

“He always looked out for you,” said Melito, now the 68-year-old president of McClancy. “He was in third grade and I was in first grade. That’s how far back we go . . . He was just a great guy.”

They were on the NYIT pitching staff together. Melito eventually became the varsity baseball coach at McClancy.

“[Cooper] would even come and talk to my players,” Melito said, “He would do anything he could to help kids. And the same thing with the college.”

Melito remembers the day when Cooper threw both ends of a seven-inning doubleheader for NYIT.

“He was not only a great pitcher but he was a great teammate,” Melito said. “. . .  He put the team before himself every day that he played.”