The only way to begin talking about Bartolo Colón, the unlikely star pitcher who now plays for the Atlanta Braves, is with his age and his figure. As of today, May 24th, he is forty-four, the oldest player in professional baseball, and thus, for a not insignificant number of American men, all that stands between them and that grave day of reckoning when the entirety of the league is younger than they are.
As for his figure: at five feet eleven and a conservatively reported two hundred and eighty-five pounds, it is one more commonly associated with jobs other than professional athlete. Jolly medieval friar, for one. No matter how many times you’ve seen Colón pitch, it’s startling to watch him stroll onto the mound—especially in these days of ballplayers sculpted by weight rooms and diet supplements. He brings to mind an earlier, Ruthian generation of baseball body or, going back further, a time when the expansiveness of a man’s physique was understood to be in proportion to his wealth and good fortune.
For the three seasons before this one, I watched Colón pitch for the Mets every fifth day. Like many, I did so with a mixture of joy and disbelief. Last year, despite a Mets pitching rotation full of flashy youngsters, he led the team in both wins and innings pitched. When called upon to field a grounder or cover first base, he is capable of a quickness that is damn near cat-like. His at-bats, meanwhile, have developed a cult following. Sometimes, he seems to decide in advance that under no circumstances will he remove the bat from his shoulder. Other times, he swings with such force that his helmet corkscrews away from his head. When, last summer, one of those swings resulted in Colón’s first career home run, the Mets play-by-play man Gary Cohen quite reasonably called it “one of the great moments in the history of baseball.”
I have made efforts to learn more about Colón, going so far as to get an assignment from a major men’s magazine to write a profile of him, securing his agent’s approval, and looking at dates to fly to the Dominican Republic, where he was spending the winter. At the last minute, word came back that the story was not going to happen; Colón simply wasn’t interested.
This was a most Colón-like response. He is a great hider of light under his fleshy bushel. With the media, Colón maintains a posture of being unable to speak English, though it’s widely suspected that he is quite fluent. (Born in the D.R., he became an American citizen in 2014 and lives with his family in New Jersey.) There may be players with something close to his age but not his girth (Ichiro Suzuki, the Marlins outfielder, is only five months younger than Colón, but he’s as tight and wiry as a jockey) and others with the weight but not the age (C. C. Sabathia, the Yankees’ oversize pitcher, has been in the league since 2001 but is only thirty-six years old). None, however, possesses the crucial third element of Bartolo Colón, which is an inscrutable Zen equanimity.
On the field, Colón responds to success the same way he does to disaster: with a bemused half-smile. He may, after giving up a home run, develop a sudden interest in passing clouds overhead, but that is about the extent of his emotional displays. I don’t mean to suggest that Colón doesn’t care about winning or losing—just that he seems to float above both. He appears to take pleasure in each game, in each pitch, without being overly concerned with the ultimate result of either.
Or, more simply and surprisingly, he seems happy. Happiness is something we tend to begrudge modern athletes. They are meant to suffer in the weight room, torture themselves on the field, grind toward the ultimate goal without ever finding satisfaction, even in victory. These are the traits we celebrate in champions like Tom Brady or Michael Jordan. But is Colón’s not the more appropriate position for an adult to take? What if we entertained the notion that obsessive competitiveness after, say, the age of thirty-five isn’t a sign of high character but, rather, deep neurosis?
For all these reasons, Colón (or my imagined Colón) has become an avatar for me of a vanishing way of watching sports. That is, as something to be enjoyed moment by moment, inning by inning, night by night, rather than entirely focussed on the singular goal of winning a championship.
Obviously, championships matter. But in a perfect world, the long and short narratives of the games are meant to be in balance. Spend five minutes today listening to misery-soaked sports talk radio and you’ll know that things have gotten out of whack. Across sports, there has been an inexorable push toward expanded playoffs, the better to give more fanbases a shot at what they have been told is the only form of vindication. How many rings a player acquired over his career has come to be seen as the most important data point in Hall-of-Fame debates. In the N.B.A. in particular, nearly every issue boils down to winning the Finals—from the controversy surrounding stars sitting out regular-season games to players like Kevin Durant joining super teams like the Golden State Warriors. “You start to devalue the whole business, which is based on regular-season ticket sales and TV money,” Jeff Van Gundy, the ESPN analyst and former N.B.A. head coach, told me recently. “I think it’s simplistic. And I think it’s irresponsible.”
We should be suspicious of all things that rob us of joy where it should be a given. And of those who say that the only thing that matters in life is victory. I’m seven months older than Colón; my own day of reckoning came in 2014, when Raúl Ibañez retired from the league. I watch most baseball games these days with my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, who calls the Mets’ pitcher Noah Syndergaard “Janice”—after the Muppet guitarist with whom he shares flowing blond locks—and who joyfully celebrates “bubble-plays.” To her, Colón’s struggles this year—he’s got a 6.38 ERA and 2–4 record with the Braves—don’t matter a whit. And they wouldn’t bother me, either, if I didn’t fear they meant that soon, Colón will be gone, too—one more strike against baseball’s promise that good things just might go on forever.
