Hi, hello & welcome to THE USB Baseball Report! I'm Steve Cook, and we're right in the middle of one of the best times of the sports year. The NBA & NHL playoffs are in full effect with games just about every night. The English Premier League just had Championship Sunday. The NFL had its Draft. Sometimes it's tough for baseball to get attention with all this other stuff going on, but there are certain events that stand out. One of those events took place Saturday.
The Home Run Heard Around The World
Bartolo Colon is certainly a cult favorite among MLB fans everywhere. The oldest active player in baseball at 42 years & 351 days, the man known as "Big Sexy" has bounced all around the world of baseball. He started out in Cleveland, got traded to Montreal for a playoff run, spent a year with the Chicago White Sox, went to the Angels for four seasons & a Cy Young Award, had a injury-shortened stint in Boston, had another year with the White Sox, spent a year as a Yankee, went to Oakland for two years & had an All-Star Game appearance at the age of 40, and has spent the last three seasons as the veteran presence in the New York Mets' dynamic young starting rotation, helping cultivate the next generation of great pitching talent.
You may have noticed that most of those were American League teams. Until his stint with the Mets, Big Bart had only played seventeen games as a member of a National League team. He had accumulated 104 regular season plate appearances during the first sixteen years of his career, so he never really had a reason to master the art of batting. And to say people have noticed this would be a great understatement.
Colon's at-bats have become appointment television due to his inability to look like anything resembling a professional batter. His helmet seems to fall off most of the time he swings the bat. He has the second-most plate appearances of all-time without drawing a walk. In 228 career at-bats he has 121 strikeouts. Lifetime .092 batting average. Colon's numbers actually "improved" last season, as his .138 average was well above the league average for pitchers. He also got a double! Apparently Colon puts a lot of practice into his hitting, but it had yet to bear fruit this season as he was 0-9 in his first six games.
And then, this happened:
So many amazing things happen here:
-Colon absolutely crushes the ball. This wasn't one of those ones that just gets over the fence, he knocks it off one of the upper decks.
-The Mets leave the dugout because that's what you do when a rookie gets his first homerun. One of those baseball things.
-The fans are going crazy like they'd just won the World Series. Lots of Mets fans there, but the Padres fans were jazzed as well. They saw history!
-The Mets announcers killed it on the call. The play by play guy borrowing Vin Scully's "The impossible has happened!" from the 1988 World Series? Top notch.
-Colon running the bases. San Diego pitcher James Shields was later asked if he was offended by how long it took Bartolo to run the bases, which is a ridiculous question to ask because Bartolo was obviously moving as fast as he could. How fast do you expect a 42 year old man in the shape of Big Sexy to run?
Colon became the oldest player to hit his first home run. He is the last remaining player to have been a Montreal Expo. He is baseball. He is life.
Baseball is all about memorable moments featuring memorable people. Bartolo Colon's 221 wins & 3.95 ERA in 19 seasons might not be enough to get him elected into the Hall of Fame, but he'll always be remembered by fans of this era as one of baseball's great characters. And this moment will always be remembered as one of baseball's greatest moments.
That has to be worth at least as much as the Honus Wagner card.
Reds Update
The Reds responded to being left out of last week's column by going 4-3 for the week. Sure, it helped that the Milwaukee Brewers came to town for a 4-game series, but I'm going to take credit for providing them with motivation to earn their way back into this column. I'm also going to give some credit to the starting rotation. It's tough to keep track of all the Reds starting pitchers currently on the disabled list. Homer Bailey might be back in June. Maybe. Rasiel Iglesias might be back in a couple of weeks. Maybe. Anthony Desclafani might be back...jeez, who knows when.
They were supposed to be the top three pitchers in the Reds' rotation, but oddly enough, starting pitching hasn't been among the Reds' main problems. They've been getting some decent starts out of the likes of Dan Strailey & Tim Adelman. If you don't know who they are, that's fine because neither do I. Prospect John Lamb came up this week for a quality start. Alfredo Simon seems to be getting it turned around. Brandon Finnegan has made the most starts for the ballclub, and with the exception of his last start has done all right.
Then of course there's Robert Stephenson, who's been great in his two appearances. The Reds are keeping him down in Louisville due to service time issues. It makes sense in the long run, but it's not exactly what Reds fans want to hear. They want to see him now because they think he's better than what they've been watching, and who cares if it means his contract will be up a year earlier? Fans care about that kind of stuff less than executives do.
The odds of this lasting aren't very good, but it gives one hope that once the actual starters return guys like Strailey & Adelman could at least be more useful in the bullpen than the slop we've been given. JJ Hoover was mercifully sent down to Louisville on Saturday to try & get his head right, but the other guys still proved perfectly capable of blowing leads on Saturday and Sunday. After splitting the 4-game set the Reds remain a half-game behind Milwaukee for 4th place in the NL Central. They meet the Pirates for three more games in their 54-game series this season & travel to Philadelphia for a three-game weekend series.
Don't even bother asking how many games they're behind the Chicago Cubs. Nobody's catching them. Remember when I said in last week's column that Pittsburgh & Washington would provide some good competition for the Cubs? The Cubs won every single game they played this week. They are completely and utterly ridiculous.
Expansion? Child Please.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred did an interview with the Chicago White Sox announcers this week where he revealed that expansion was on the minds of MLB brass and his preference was to put new teams in Montreal & Mexico City. Everybody got excited and then speculated about cities that should get teams. Dustin James even tweeted about it, so you know it was something that people are interested in.
Meanwhile I'm sitting here like "Dude, half the teams are godawful, most of them have trouble filling their stadiums and you're talking about adding more teams?" Even if we're talking years down the road, the idea of adding more teams, spending more taxpayer money on stadiums and stretching the talent pool thinner than it already is seems a touch ridiculous to this observer.
The only real argument in favor of expansion is that it makes scheduling easier. Of course, it's baseball's own fault that they decided to give the American & National Leagues an odd number of teams so there would be constant interleague play, diluting the gimmick even more than it was already. I try not to be Old School Baseball Fan too much because people find that annoying, but I do yearn for the days where the AL & NL teams never met except during the World Series & the best players hooking up in the All-Star Game.
Side Note: It really is amazing how they've managed to take the drama out of interleague play. There are some events that would make it worthwhile...for example, how fun would it be if Albert Pujols & the Los Angeles Angels went to St. Louis? Pujols back in front of the Cardinal fans that he started his career in front of and brought championships to would be a great moment. Would the fans cheer him in appreciation of his previous accomplishments, or boo him because he left them behind to get paid? The Cardinals & Angels played back in 2013 in Anaheim, and they're meeting again this week...in Anaheim. Huh? How do you not put one of those series in St. Louis? I guess we'll have to wait until 2019 or 2022, by which point most of the fans that rooted for Pujols during his Cardinal years will be in the nursing home.
I get the idea of adding international teams to make MLB more global and the "World Series" kind of including the rest of the world too, but with the political climate being what it is, I really don't see adding a team in Mexico being a good idea. I mean, what if Donald Trump gets elected President? The team won't be able to cross the border & play teams in the US!
I think the best way to get some other cities in on the MLB action is to relocate. The Oakland Athletics need a new stadium? Why not move them to Las Vegas or Portland? That gets them out of the Giants' hair and puts baseball in a new market. This is a franchise that's already called Philadelphia & Kansas City home, so it's amazing they've stayed in Oakland so long.
The Tampa Bay Rays have never drawn in Tampa and their stadium is the drizzling poops. Why not eventually move them to another Southern market like Charlotte or Nashville that's experiencing population growth from people other than old-timers that are just going to root for the Yankees anyway?
Common sense. Get outta here with this Mexico City stuff. I mean, it's not as crazy as the NFL's fixiation with London, but it's still kinda out there.
Three Series To Watch This Week
1. Mariners at Orioles (Tuesday-Thursday): I'm typing this on Friday night and both of these teams are in first place in their divisions. Who saw that coming? The Orioles have shown some fire in recent years, but the Mariners haven't contended for much of anything since the early 2000s. They're a rebuilding team with a ton of young talent that's gotten hot early in the season. Can it last? It'll get its toughest test yet this week in Camden Yards. We should at least watch this so we can learn who some of these young Mariners are. Of course there's Robinson Cano, don'tcha know. Ketel Marte is on my fantasy team. Nelson Cruz. That's the list of Mariners I can name off the top of my head.
2. Tigers at Nationals (Monday-Wednesday): Both teams are in tight races within their divisions right now, and the pitching matchup of the week has to be Jordan Zimmermann vs. Max Scherzer on Wednesday. The former National returning to D.C. to take on a former Tiger should be good stuff. Zimmermann has been great so far this season, Scherzer not so much but he's always a threat for a lights-out performance.
3. Blue Jays at Rangers (Friday-Sunday): These teams faced off in the ALDS last year. It was a pretty great series that's mostly remembered for this:
I'm not against bat flips...as long as the bat doesn't hit anybody in the head I think it's an acceptable celebration. But there's never going to be any flipping of the bat that tops that particular bat flip. Not gonna happen. You might as well retire the celebration and find another way to make baseball fun again, because you're not topping Jose Bautista. The Rangers have had a heck of a time topping the Jays recently, as they lost that series and lost three of four in Toronto last week. Can the lovely scenery of Texas flip the script, or will the Jays continue their rebound from a lackluster April performance?
Welp, that's all we have time for this week! Thanks for reading, and see you next time!
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