At 43, with birthday No. 44 coming May 24, Bartolo Colon is the oldest player in the major leagues. Wearing his ninth different major league uniform, the one the Atlanta Braves gave him, Colon has averaged 15.5 wins in the four seasons since he turned 40.
With a pair of 15-win seasons and an 18-win season, this has been his most productive stretch since the four seasons from 2002 through 2005 when he compiled 74 wins, including a pair of 20-win seasons, with the Indians, the Expos and the White Sox. His age during that stretch was 29 to 32.
“It’s remarkable,” said Mark Shapiro, who was in his first year as Cleveland’s general manager when the Indians signed Colon in 1993 in his small rural birth place in the Dominican Republic. “I think it’s a testament to his knowledge and his adaptability as well as uniqueness of his strength of his body. It’s awesome, one of those things that defy explanation.”
Shapiro credited Winston Llenas, a former major league infielder, with finding and signing Colon.
“Winston Llenas was in charge of our Latin American operation,” Shapiro recalled from Toronto, where he is president of the Blue Jays. “I don’t remember the story too well, but I remember he was extremely excited about Bartolo’s arm and stature. He was unconventional in size and stature. He was stockier and shorter than average and not the prototypical pitcher’s body.”
“I was there for one of his first bullpen sessions. The ball came out of his hand differently than other guys.”
Llenas said he signed Colon for a $3,000 bonus, which makes the portly right-hander (he’s listed in the media guide as 5-feet-11 and 283 pounds) one of the biggest bargains in baseball history.
When I called Llenas in the Dominican Republic and told him I wanted to talk to him about Colon, he laughed and remarked, “He’s going to pitch forever.”
How did you find him, I asked Llenas, who is now an adviser to the Indians.
“We saw this kid who showed up one day,” Llenas related. “He wasn’t as big as he is now. He kept coming back. Every week, every week. He was always wearing a red t-shirt. One day we said let’s put him in a game, see if he can throw strikes. He started to throw strikes and he hasn’t finished yet. He’s huge, but he’s healthy. He hasn’t had any problems with his arm. He’s rare. He’s shown he can pitch. Anything he does doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Colon reached the majors in 1997 with the Indians and made 17 starts in five separate visits. He didn’t start as few as 30 games again until 2006, when he was in the third of his four seasons with the Angels, and he made 33 or 34 starts in five successive seasons from 2001 through 2005.
In his three seasons with the New York Mets, his last three seasons pitching at the ages of 41, 42 and 43, he made a total of 95 starts. Only 17 other pitchers, according to Elias Sports Bureau, have started that many games in the three-year period. That leaves a lot of younger pitchers who for health reasons or ineffectiveness didn’t match their older colleague.
Last season Colon worked in a rotation with the Mets’ best, brightest and youngest and outworked them all. This is what they did last season (starts/innings):
- Bartolo Colon 33 / 191 2/3
- Noah Syndergaard 30 / 183 2/3
- Jacob deGrom 24 / 148
- Steven Matz 22 / 132 1/3
Despite Colon’s three-year record of 44-34, 588 2/3 innings and 3.91 earned run average, the Mets did not retain Colon as a free agent this winter.
“The Mets were in it, but the Braves’ interest was more genuine and more intense,” said Adam Katz, the pitcher’s agent the past six years.
The Atlanta contract gives Colon the largest single-season payday he has had in his 19-year career. The only bigger deal was the 4-year, $51 million contract he signed with the Angels as a free agent before the 2004 season.
The next contract he signed, though, was a minor league contract with the Boston Red Sox. He had spent much of the 2007 season on the disabled list and didn’t sign for the 2008 season until the last week of February. When he signed with the New York Yankees for the 2011 season, he accepted a minor league contract that would pay him $900,000.
In his career, Colon has filed for free agency eight times, became a free agent a ninth time when the Chicago White Sox released him in 2009 and was traded twice. The trades came little more than six months apart, and the first one was one of the most notable swaps in the past 15 years.
On June 27, 2002, the Indians traded Colon to the Montreal Expos for four players, three of whom would become prominent major leaguers: pitcher Cliff Lee, second baseman Brandon Phillips, outfielder Grady Sizemore and first baseman Lee Stevens.
Stevens was nearing the end of his career and retired after the season. Lee had not pitched in the majors before that trade, and he barely pitched in the majors in his first two seasons with the Indians.
The left-handed Lee had a superb season for the Indians in 2008, leading the American League with 22 victories and a 2.54 earned run average while incurring only three losses.
Phillips celebrated his 21st birthday the day after the trade and played sporadically for the Indians for the next three and a half seasons. The Indians traded him in to Cincinnati, who subsequently sent him to the Cubs for whom he pitched very little for three seasons.
Why have I gone into the trades that emerged from the original deal between the Expos and the Indians? Because it is symbolic of one of Bud Selig’s egregious acts as commissioner.
Players and owners were negotiating a new labor agreement and not getting anywhere. Selig came up with what he thought was a brilliant plan. He started talking about contracting two teams, eliminating them to save money for the remaining owners. Not only would it help the clubs financially, but it would also result in hurting the union because 50 major league jobs would be eliminated.
Selig was so proud of coming up with the scheme that he even kept it from the general manager of the Expos, whom Major League Baseball owner, having purchased the Expos from Jeffrey Loria so could buy the Florida (now Miami) Marlins. John Henry owned the Marlins, but he wanted to buy the Red Sox, which Selig aided and abetted him in doing by ignoring at least one higher bid for the Red Sox.
Because reporters and fans as well as the other clubs didn’t know about Selig’s scheme, everyone went about his business, talking about contraction but not opposing it because it didn’t affect them.
Omar Minaya was the Expos’ general manager, and as the season progressed and the Expos were in the race for a post-season spot, Minaya began figuring out what trades he could make to enhance the Expos’ chances of getting to the playoffs.
“Damn the critics, full speed ahead,” Minaya said in effect.
“We had to try to have short-term success,” said Minaya, who is now an executive with the Players Association said in a telephone interview. “In 2002 there was no long-term success. Part of that was understanding the need to have short-term success.”
Trading away three prospects like Lee, Phillips and Sizemore wouldn’t matter to the Expos, Minaya figured, because Selig had made it known that there wouldn’t be any Expos. Minaya thought Colon would help the short-term success, and the idea was to get him at any cost.
Recalling the environment at the time, Minaya said, “Players didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know what the future was. They couldn’t buy houses. The climate was difficult. The team was in limbo.
“The only thing to do was try to manage the team to win, try to have a competitive team on the field and we did. Both this year and the next the team was over .500 and played into September in the pennant race.”
Why were the Indians willing to give up Colon?
“They made the deal because they were at the end of their run of success and needed players for the future,” Minaya said. “Mark got killed for making that deal. Cleveland had a long-term plan. We had a short-term plan. We knew we were giving up good players, but we also knew we were getting a guy who was a good pitcher. He became a Cy Young winner.”
The biggest knock on Colon is his weight. However, Minaya said, “There are some guys who are heavy, but they have quick feet. His feet have always been quick feet.” Looking for comparisons – big body, quick feet – Minaya cited Babe Ruth, CC Sabathia and Tony Gwynn.
Katz, Colon’s agent, has only known him as a heavy-set fellow, but he said:
“Outside of being a world-class natural athlete, he’s been blessed with being very durable. The thing that doesn’t get talked about as much as it should is his ability to be in the moment and block out outside noise. By that I mean if he gives up a home run or has a bad inning, it’s gone. I’ve never seen anything like it. He has this ability to block out mistakes and be in the moment and put things behind him as well as anyone I’ve ever seen.”
Besides that, Katz said, “He prepares. He’s a dedicated athlete. He takes care of himself. He works very hard and he’s durable. He doesn’t look liked an athlete, but he moves like an athlete.”
THIS SAMSON HAS NO STRENGTHS, ONLY WEAKNESSES
Call it oversight, call it forgetfulness, call it anything you want. But in last week’s column about Jeffrey Loria, owner of the Miami Marlins, I committed a serious oversight, failing to mention the team president, David Samson, and the significant contributions he has made to the Marlins and the serious status he and they hold in the area’s sports landscape.
“I’m not a Loria fan,” said a lawyer who knows Loria well, “but I think his biggest problem in Miami has been Samson. He has had an outsized influence in Miami. It might have been different.”
Samson, who is Loria’s stepson by one of Loria’s three marriages (does a stepchild remain a stepchild if his or her parent becomes divorced from the step-parent?) is notorious for his reputation among baseball people as one of the worst baseball executives.
“One of the worst” may be too kind to Samson. Some say he is the worst.
Loria, however, has not dumped Samson, whom he knows is roundly disliked. Maybe the owner keeps Samson in office so he, Loria, won’t be viewed as the most disliked member of the Marlins’ organization. It would be a close race.