I was just 7 years old and a budding baseball fan in the summer of 2002, but even at that young age, I couldn’t resist imitating more experienced analysts and playing armchair general manager.
The first object of my assistance was the Expos, who sat on the edge of playoff contention, a handful of games back of both the division and wild-card leads. I wrote a letter to the team’s general manager, Omar Minaya, advocating that he trade for Cleveland starter Chuck Finley to bolster the Montreal rotation. Why Finley? In retrospect, I’m not particularly sure—the veteran lefthander was 39 years old in 2002 and had amassed a 5.54 ERA the year before. But nonetheless, my shrewd GM mind tabbed Finley as the Expos’ missing piece, the necessary addition to propel them to their first playoff appearance in two decades.
It was much to my delight when Minaya actually consummated a trade for a Cleveland starting pitcher—only he took a bigger swing than I had suggested. Instead of Finley, Bartolo Colon was the centerpiece of the trade, with Montreal surrendering first baseman Lee Stevens and three prospects in exchange.
Colon pitched half a season for the Expos and didn’t see the team finish within striking distance of a playoff berth; the prospects traded for him—Brandon Phillips, Cliff Lee, and Grady Sizemore—have combined for 10 All-Star selections, placing the Colon deal on numerous “worst trades in MLB history” lists in the years since.
Of course, the Expos faced extenuating circumstances when considering what otherwise would have been an ill-advised move given the team’s status as a fringe wild-card contender at the time: leading up to and throughout that season, rumors abounded that the team was slated for contraction. Only a playoff splash would have helped to save the team, the thinking went, so young minor leaguers who couldn’t contribute immediately were an unaffordable luxury.
“Every team in baseball was preparing a draft board because the Expos players were going to be dispersed,” Minaya told Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci in 2007. “[Class] A ballplayers or even Double A players didn’t matter because we were looking at contraction at the end of the season. It was a no-brainer for me.”
At the time of the trade, Phillips was playing Triple-A, Lee Double-A, and Sizemore high-A ball, and it was to the Indians’ great gain to turn a starter nearing free agency into three young players with potential.
Phillips was the best prospect dealt to Cleveland, but he struggled as a 22-year-old rookie in 2003, collecting the worst batting average, on-base percentage, and OPS of any player with as many plate appearances that season. He became a fixture of the Indians’ Triple-A lineup the next two years, tallying just four hits in 31 at-bats at the major-league level over that time.
Frustrated with his stalled progress, the Indians traded Phillips for a fringe prospect in April 2006, only to see him immediately become one of the best infielders in the majors. Since becoming a regular, he has four gold gloves and three All-Star appearances to his name and has the second-most hits in the National League.
Lee, meanwhile, stayed with Cleveland and, after suffering from inconsistency in his first seasons in the majors, broke through as a star in 2008, leading the American League in wins and ERA and easily winning the Cy Young Award. Between 2008 and 2013, Lee had a 2.89 ERA for four teams and exceeded 200 innings each year, making four All-Star games and serving as a prototypical ace.
And Sizemore, the youngest prospect traded for Colon, is one of the great lost stars of the last decade. He played only four full, injury-free seasons in the majors; in that stretch (2005-08), he made three All-Star teams, received MVP votes three times, won two Gold Gloves, and was the best outfielder in baseball by wins above replacement. He had a .281/.372/.496 slash line and averaged 27 home runs, 29 stolen bases, 116 runs, and 81 runs batted in per year in those four seasons. Sizemore ranked as one of the 20 best outfielders in history by WAR accumulated through his age-25 season, and his top match by Baseball Reference’s similarity score feature that year was Barry Bonds.
But a strange thing has happened 13 years after Minaya pulled the trigger: Colon has become the most consistently productive player from the deal. That’s not to say that the trade is becoming more balanced in retrospect—it is now a decade since the Expos moved to Washington, D.C., and Colon, on his seventh team since spending half a season in Montreal, is the only former Expo who has played an inning this season. Rather, it’s more a commentary on Colon’s uniquely impressive feat as a player experiencing a second prime in a sport dominated by stars more than a decade his junior.
In the typical veteran-rental-for-prospects trade that is viewed as a “steal” in retrospect, the veteran in question is collecting his pension long before the prospects’ careers are done. To wit: Jeff Bagwell was the most valuable player in Larry Andersen’s last season. John Smoltz won the Cy Young Award seven years after Doyle Alexander’s final game. Jay Buhner—much to Frank Costanza’s chagrin—hit 281 home runs after Ken Phelps was out of baseball. But Colon appears poised to outlast the prospects for whom he was traded years after it looked like his career was at its close.
Colon won the Cy Young Award as a 32-year-old Angel in 2005, winning 21 games with a 3.48 ERA, but he failed to reach even 100 innings in any of the next five seasons. After missing all of 2010 due to a smorgasbord of arm problems, however, Colon returned as a stable force in the Yankees’ rotation for a year before moving to Oakland, where he went 28-15 with a 2.99 ERA in two years.
Since signing with the Mets before last season, Colon has both continued his run of success and become an Internet cult hero, jiggling his way into the hearts of baseball fans across the country and inspiring quote after quippy quote about his play. Mets manager Terry Collins recently explained how Colon’s veteran presence can help New York’s horde of young starters: “If you can do nothing else except learn how he goes about things mentally, you don’t have to copy him—don’t copy him physically—just how he gets ready to pitch every night, I think it’s going to help your career.”
And on Tuesday, Commissioner Rob Manfred turned to Colon’s delightfully aggressive offensive approach to discuss his opposition to adding the designated hitter to the National League, telling reporters, “Not having National League pitchers hit would deprive us of the entertainment Bartolo Colon has given us this year. It’s been a great source of entertainment for me.”
That entertainment is widespread and fervent. The Wall Street Journal might run piece after piece about baseball’s falling popularity, but not when Colon is at bat: such an occurrence is “can’t-miss television,” according to a May 19 article. Searching Colon’s name on MLB.com’s video page brings up seven different results about his bat before one about his arm; The New York Times’ recap of Colon’s most recent start mentions his hitting in the headline and terms him a “superhero.”
With all that fawning over his at-bats, it’s easy to miss how well Colon has pitched; over the last half-century, only nine pitchers besides Colon have pitched 400 innings with a sub-4 ERA after turning 40. The lone member of that list not enshrined in the Hall of Fame is Roger Clemens.
He’s done it armed with just one pitch: his fastball, which he throws more than 80% of the time, giving him the top fastball rate in the league three years running. But the simple approach works, and Colon leads the NL in wins and strikeout-to-walk ratio. On a team level, the Mets are 8-3 in his starts and just 21-22 in all other games.
Opposing Colon’s resurgence have been the age- and injury-induced swoons of the three former prospects. Phillips’s decline has been steady and unabated: his slugging percentage and OPS have dropped each of the last five seasons, and the onetime 30-30 man has just 11 home runs and eight stolen bases since the start of last season.
Lee’s streak of above-average 200-inning seasons ended abruptly last year; amid a lost Phillies season, he lasted just 81 ⅓ innings, gave up hits at a higher rate than in any previous year, and saw his ERA balloon to 3.65, a mark in line with the NL’s 3.66 average. The elbow injury that ended Lee’s streak last season has persisted into 2015, and he hasn’t thrown a pitch this year.
Although Sizemore’s star may have shone brightest among the trio, his decline was also the swiftest. To repeat from earlier, Sizemore’s closest Baseball Reference comparison through age 25 was Barry Bonds, but sadly for Sizemore, his last full season came just a year after Bonds’s. A litany of injuries cut into his promising career: he missed a third of the 2009 season and played just 104 games combined across 2010 and 2011, during which he was a shell of his former five-tool self. In those two final years with Cleveland, he managed a mere .220/.280/.379 batting line and had as many disabled-list visits as stolen bases.
Sizemore sat out all of 2012 and 2013 due to knee surgery and tried returning for Boston and Philadelphia over the past two years, and while the fluid swing and grace in the outfield were still there, the results were not. In addition to ranking as one of the game’s worst defenders, he hit just .216 for Boston and posted the third-worst OPS of any outfielder with at least 100 plate appearances for Philadelphia this season. After he was designated for assignment by the Phillies last week and officially released on Monday, it’s unclear whether he will get another comeback chance.
But five years ago, people could have said the same about Colon—and now, against all expectations, he’s pitching like it’s 2005 and making headlines with every swing of the bat.