Can't Stop, Won't Stop: The Persistence of Bartolo Colon

On Wednesday, the New York Mets reportedly re-signed the great and powerful, in the full Wizard of Oz sense, Bartolo Colon, who turns 43 next May, to a one-year contract. Before we get into that, though, let's take a moment for Jack Quinn, who, like Colon, is one of the 77 pitchers to have won more than 200 and less than 300 games in the Major Leagues. Quinn, a player from before the Second World War, may be on the obscure side, but he has plenty of company within that group: fewer than half of those 77 are in the Hall of Fame. Winning 200 games is as much a ticket to immortality as winning American Idol.

Quinn, for his part, was a spitballer who attempted to pitch forever, fooling teams by disguising his true birthdate; this turned out to be easy because he didn't know what it was. Even that successful lie had limitations, however. It had to. If you hang around the big leagues long enough—in Quinn's case, almost 25 years—people start to figure out that even if you came up at 15 or 16—and, apart from Joe Nuxhall and a handful of others, that doesn't happen—16 + 25 = 41, which would make you pretty darned old for a ballplayer. And no one thought Quinn had come up at 16.

In fact, by the 1930s, when Quinn was still pitching (and he had come up in 1909), the sportswriters had a theory that he old enough to be a veteran of the Spanish-American War. They'd go around asking Quinn if he remembered the Maine—first-hand, that is—and Quinn would have to pretend he had no idea what they were talking about. As it was, he threw his last major league pitch at 50 years of age, still muttering that he was just a kid and cursing anyone who wanted to know what it was like to charge up San Juan Hill.

I've told Quinn's story before, because no other story illustrates quite so well what keeps players hanging on—simply put, sticking around is a way of putting off the rest of your life. More than a few players from back in Quinn's day ended up pumping gas to get by, and not in the Three Finger Brown sense that they'd bought a service station with their earnings. Future Hall of Famers like Ernie Lombardi and Jimmie Foxx were purely employees. Or think of Cristóbel Torriente, the Cuban-born Negro Leagues star, who was dead, at 44, after a dozen years wandering New York City in an alcoholic haze, his lungs disintegrating from tuberculosis. A player may wind up retired a long time; he may not be retired long at all. There's no knowing, but as long as you're in it, the game provides a safe haven against life's looming unknowns.

Colon, with career earnings of over $100 million as of this new contract, will have a happier fate than those long-tenured predecessors. He's a seemingly more lighthearted figure (particularly when hitting), but even if he can't be accused of fighting with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders—ask him about D-Day instead—Colon is in the same boat as Quinn and countless other players before him, trying to push off the date of that final pitch as far as possible. Eventually, he will have to face life after baseball, and all its uncertainties. Until then, until the game tells him to stop, Colon can continue working at the best job on earth.

Casey Stengel once deflected criticism from a post-retirement Jackie Robinson by saying that Jackie used to be something special, but "now everybody knows he's just Chock Full O' Nuts." That's where Robinson earned his living at the time, working for the coffee and lunch counter company. This was a low blow from Stengel, if only because as a former ballplayer himself he well knew that there was no response. Robinson continued to be a great man in his retirement and never gave up fighting for the cause of equality—sometimes wisely, sometimes not so much, but always with the passion and commitment that had made him a hero. Yet every great athlete is made somehow ghostly by retirement. Perform heroic feats on a baseball field? Few people can do that. Put on a tie and sit behind a desk? Everyone can do that. If life in a cubicle is demeaning for most of us, imagine its power over someone who once ran down the balls that Cal Ripken hit—or in Colon's case, struck him out. This is a loss of command to deny at all costs.

At this stage, Colon isn't going to win 300 games, and even if he somehow did, his 2012 suspension for testing positive for testosterone would keep him out of the Hall of Fame for all the usual uptight reasons. There is no guarantee that this 19th try at winning a World Series will pay off. All that Colon is certain to accomplish, besides make enough money to endow three or four chairs at the university of his choice, is another year of holding back an unwanted dawn.

If we define "athlete" as someone in peak physical condition, Colon isn't in any sense that. He's also no longer a very good pitcher, but he still has value—there's nothing electric or exhilarating about reliability, but Colon has so refined his craft that there's some quiet art (and understated effectiveness) to it all the same. If his value to the Mets is still grounded in his physical capacities, his value to the rest of us is psychological. He can do one thing that even some pitchers 20 years younger can't: he can stand on the mound every five days, happily consume innings, and not get battered by line drives. He does it by taking an 88-mph fastball, which he uses roughly 85 percent of the time, and throwing it for strikes as often as any pitcher in the game. In 2015, Max Scherzer led the majors with 71 percent of pitches going for strikes. Colon was right behind him at 70.3. His 1.1 walks per nine innings led the majors. Subtract the five free passes Terry Collins ordered and his rate drops to 0.88.

Even given those positives, Colon doesn't necessarily have a job. For one thing, a pitcher who always throws one of the slower fastballs in the major leagues around the strike zone is going to give up hits, and Colon gave up more than anyone in the National League last year, both on a volume and per-nine-inning basis. More important, the Mets have younger, better options in Matt Harvey, Jacob DeGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, and, eventually, Zack Wheeler, who had Tommy John surgery back in March. Colon is an insurance policy against Wheeler being slow to regain his old form or one of the other twenty-somethings breaking down.

This is, parenthetically, a gift of the Mets' fecklessness. Teams with financial limitations create opportunities for fun, outré choices like Colon; the ancient Quinn pitched for the Dodgers when they were deeply in debt. A seat on Johnny Cueto's jet would have cost $22 million a season, with the bills marching on into the next decade, but a spin on Colon's patchy dirigible will cost $7.25 million for a year. By current baseball standards, it's more expensive than going with a no-name rookie, but in veteran terms it's a trip to 7-11 for a bag of corn nuts. Given that a team with greater resources might encourage Colon to spend more time fishing, we have to thank the Mets for arriving here.

We owe them that because Colon's struggle is our struggle. We—you and me and every other human— struggle to keep age at bay and dread the prospect of our fastballs becoming slowballs. We fight to keep our expanding waistlines from sapping our vitality and attenuating our lives. Late in his career, Babe Ruth was once heard to remark that the thing he hated most about being so fat was that he couldn't see his dick anymore. What the Babe might have been confessing to was the real dread: it's not that you can't see it but that, metaphorically speaking, it's gone.

But Colon is not gone yet. As long as he keeps pitching, the sun will still rise, the world must keep turning, the rest of us will remain young. If he can do it, we can. All the scary stuff, the unvanquishable unknowns, will come after. May we never see the day. Pitch on, Bartolo.