Professional sports likes to market itself based on its unpredictability. Fans are consistently sold on scrappy underdogs who overcome long odds to achieve eternal glory. It’s good marketing, but like most good marketing it’s a little bit misleading.
Even in the cases like Leicester City’s recent Premier League win, which was admittedly wildly improbable, the difference between players and teams are exaggerated to some degree. At the end of the day, everyone is involved is an elite athlete and the fact they are able to compete above their presumed skill level from time to time isn’t that outrageous.
Bartolo Colon is not an elite athlete. He is a human being with a particular set of skills, not unlike Liam Neeson, but he’s not an elite athlete. This is not a slight on Colon, it’s a matter of fact. The 42-year-old didn’t earn the nickname “Big Sexy” from bodybuilding.
Despite his limitations, on Saturday Colon did something that most didn’t think possible and hit a baseball over a wall 364.74 feet from home plate. The confluence of factors that allowed this borderline miracle was perfect.
He was facing James Shields, the pitcher who’s allowed more home runs than any pitcher in baseball since the beginning of 2015. Shields also generously placed the baseball in the perfect place for it to rack up some frequent flyer miles.
This does not diminish Colon’s accomplishment in the slightest. Shields threw him this pitch because there was absolutely no reason to believe he would would be hurt by the large quadragenarian.
Prior to this fateful moment, Colon had come to the plate 246 times in his 19-year career. He’d struck out 119 times. Somehow he managed two extra-base hits, but neither hinted at a home-run stroke.
Last season he poked the ball to centre field, but Ichiro Suzuki was shading him to right and playing him comically shallow which allowed the ball to drop in and roll to the wall.
In 2014 Colon managed to yank a line drive down the line against the St. Louis Cardinals.
In 246 trips to the plate that was it.
What makes Colon’s home run so magical isn’t that it was unlikely, but rather that a rational person would say it couldn’t be done. It’s impossible to figure out the odds because no one would have made such a ridiculous bet. Even after his landmark moment his career line at the plate is .092/.099/.114.
Sometimes professional athletes can be hard to relate to due to their wealth and otherworldly physical prowess. Colon does not have this problem. At the plate he looks like he’s a guy who got lost and wandered onto a field where everyone was too polite to tell him to leave.
As a hitter, he’s closer to the average fan than he is to Bryce Harper. When Harper hits a home run we marvel at the kind of skill that we couldn’t even imagine possessing. When Colon put one over the wall we imagined that we might be able to do it too. It was a moment that fans could participate more than any in recent memory.
If a 42-year-old pitcher built like a Jell-O sculpture, who’s spent only three-and-a-half of his 19 years in the National League, can take a major-league pitcher deep then Kevin Garnett was right. Anything is possible.