In the sixth inning of game three of the New York Mets-Los Angeles Dodgers NLDS, Bartolo Colon relieved starter Matt Harvey and proceeded to strike out all three Dodgers he faced. Mr. Colon, now 42 years of age, added this outing to one of the most unique baseball resumes you will ever see.
Bartolo Colon broke in to the majors with the powerful 1997 Cleveland Indians, who damn near brought a World Series championship back to Cleveland. His teammates included Kevin Seitzer, Kevin Mitchell and Orel Hershiser, all of whom last played when Bill Clinton was president. Two of his teammates that year, Matt Williams and Sandy Alomar, Jr., are former managers. To say Colon has been around a bit would be a gross understatement.
He was one of the game’s better pitchers when the Indians sent him to the Montreal Expos in 2002 at the trade deadline. Colon won ten games for the Expos that year (and twenty overall), but the Expos nevertheless fell out of the race. As a lousy staring down contraction, they were in no need of an ace and shipped him to the Chicago White Sox. By the way, unless someone like Rondell White or Ted Lilly makes a comeback, Colon will go down as the last remaining former Montreal Expo to be playing.
Now on his third team in two seasons with the ChiSox, he produced another good year as he entered free agency and signed with the Anaheim-though-not-yet-kinda-but-not-really-Los Angeles Angels. In 2004, he won eighteen games for the Halos and followed it up in 2005 by winning the Cy Young Award with twenty-one wins and a 1.16 WHIP. That was the eighth-consecutive season in which he’d posted double-digit wins. He was a solid, dependable pitcher at the top of his game.
The next few seasons, Colon’s ride got a little bumpy, as he dealt with a barrage of injuries while moving on to the Red Sox and then back to the White Sox. By 2009, he seemed done; he was thirty-six years old and had gone four years without really being an effective pitcher. In March of 2010, he underwent a stem cell transplant to try to fix his ailing shoulder and sat out the season while playing ball in Puerto Rico. And then we saw the emergence of Bartolo Colon 2.0.
Now much heavier than in his first major-league stint, he was ready for more. He signed a minor-league deal with the Yankees in 2011 and was called up in plenty of time to have a nice little comeback year, finishing 8-10 with a not-terrible 4.00 ERA. He parlayed that perfectly adequate season into a cheap-ish contract with the Oakland A’s and their forever bargain-hunting GM Billy Beane. Now thirty-nine years old and starting to look like two of his younger self, Colon just kept on going. It was then, however, that MLB figured out how he was doing it: they busted him for steroid use and handed him a fifty-game suspension. Oops.
Colon came back – again. At age forty, he went 18-6 with a sparkling 2.65 ERA for the A’s. He made $5 million in two years with the A’s and then went to the Mets for a far more substantial two-year, $20 million contract. Whether it was genetics, luck, more steroids, the stem-cell operation, or fried-chicken smoothies, Colon just kept getting it done. Now back in the National League for the first time since his brief stint with Montreal, he entertained fans and legions of social media users by batting in games. If you have ever wanted to see a gorilla performing The Nutcracker, watching Colon use a bat comes pretty darn close.
So now we’re in 2015. Bartolo 2.0 starts out the year like a ball of fire, contributing to an early Mets winning streak that gave hope to their long-suffering fans. Both he and the team faltered through the middle part of the season before again catching fire and taking advantage of the Washington Nationals’ implosion. Colon won fourteen games, just barely missing the fifteen-win mark he had reached the year before. The Mets made the playoffs and Bartolo Colon hit the bullpen, coming in and getting the job done once again. He’s been in the twilight of his career for a full decade now. The Mets have a lot of young pitchers who they might not want to push too hard, so maybe they bring him back. The Last Active Expo, a workhorse with 218 career Wins, will be forty-three next year and more than a few pounds over his ideal body mass, but he’ll pitch somewhere. He always does.
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