In terms of his baseball life, Bartolo Colon might as well have been dead. He had endured a six-season span in which he suffered a string of injuries in four of the seasons, didn’t pitch in the major leagues in one of those years and plodded through a mediocre season with the New York Yankees, completing it with a 0-4 record and 5.36 earned run average in his last 10 starts.

Now, three months from his 41st birthday, the right-handed pitcher is beginning a two-year contract with the New York Mets that will pay him $20 million, the biggest payday of his 16-year career. His salaries in the past six seasons totaled $9 million.

Scott Kazmir, another pitcher, is Colon’s co-contract comeback player, signing a two-year $22 million contract with Oakland. Last season he played for Cleveland for a $1 million salary after having pitched in an independent minor league the year before and making one major league start in 2011.

Though their paths have not crossed physically, Colon and Kazmir have had similar experiences. Both have …

Keep reading...

A recent column about Derek Jeter’s retirement announcement turned out to be more about Gene Michael than Jeter. The column gave Michael credit for changing the culture of the New York Yankees’ organization in the early 1990s when he was general manager and George Steinbrenner was suspended.

However, I have learned that Michael deserves even more credit than I have given him. I credited Michael with changing Steinbrenner’s thinking – and don’t think that was ever easy – about trading good young players for high-priced veterans instead of keeping the good young players and letting them develop into good major leaguers.

In that same column I mentioned Joe Torre’s hiring as the Yankees’ manager for the 1996 season, writing that Torre wasn’t Michael’s idea but that “Arthur Richman, a senior member of the media relations department, recommended Torre, with whom Richman had worked with the Mets.”

That story had prevailed for 18 years. For 18 years Richman had been given credit for the hiring of the man who managed the Yankees to four World Series championships in a five-year span. The only problem was it was a fairy tale …

Keep reading...

Not everyone was fascinated by Masahiro Tanaka’s means of transportation from Tokyo to New York last week for his introductory news conference upon joining the Yankees with his $155 million contract.

“It would be interesting,” an environmentally minded reader of this web site wrote, “to find out how many gallons of fuel it takes to send a giant jet round trip from Tokyo – more, I bet, than most of us use in a lifetime. And can you imagine all the pollution it caused.

“Perhaps someone will come up with an appropriate nickname for Tanaka – such as ‘200G-Jet Tanaka’ – so we don’t forget how he started out.”

Tanaka chartered a Japan Airlines Boeing 787 jet to bring him, his wife, their dog and three other passengers to New York before a series of snow storms struck the region. The Yankees’ newest pitcher was …

Keep reading...