Bartolo Colon [1] presumably sets eight or nine major league records every time he steps on a major league field, so it’s understandable if this one escaped the bookkeepers’ notice. To be fair, it’s probably not a record, but I’m gonna say it is.
By defeating the Atlanta Braves [2], 7-2, on a rain-delayed Thursday night/Friday morning at Turner Field, Bartolo brought home his club’s 79th victory for the second consecutive season. He was the pitcher of record when the Mets put a 79th win in the books in 2014 and the pitcher of record on that same numeric occasion in 2015.
Probably not a record. More like a coincidence. But it’s worth noting because in 2014, the 79th win came in Game 162, a.k.a. Closing Day, a.k.a. the last game of the year. It took Colon and those Mets an entire season to round up 79 wins. Fans of arithmetic — and the Mets — probably realize 79 wins left room for 83 losses, making 2014 what is known as a losing season.
Which was nothing new when Colon was throwing six innings of eight-hit ball at the Houston Astros at Citi Field last September 28. The Mets went on to win, 8-3, sending the last of us Flushing pilgrims off into winter on a pleasant note [3]. We had watched our team equal its high for most wins since it had stopped winning more games than it lost as a matter of annual course. The 2014 Mets matched the 2010 Mets by going 79-83, which served to bracket records of 77-85, 74-88 and 74-88 while offering little satisfaction in the process. Some progress was clearly evident on the road to a zero-sum gain across four years. Some was well hidden. It was up to us to infer what we could about future performance based on the sample size we had just witnessed.
I doubt any of us peered ahead to the following September and saw a 79th win posted with more than three weeks remaining in the schedule. Not that anybody exactly aims at 79 wins as a benchmark, but for the Mets who had been losing more games than they had been winning with sickening regularity since 2009, 79 wins had been the top, their veritable Tower of Pisa.
Today, at 79-61, it is a pit stop. Seventy-nine is an incidental total about to be surpassed. The Mets will capture an eightieth victory in short order; then an eighty-first, which will ensure they will not lose more than they win this season; then an eighty-second, which will guarantee their first winning record in seven attempts.
And then? Then, we will have the gall to predict, those numbers — 79, 80, 81, 82 — will look smaller and smaller as bigger and better totals, milestones and achievements move into their grasp. It’s what happens when you’re winning far more than you’re losing. The relative accomplishments represented by what looked enormous in one era will appear insignificant in the next one.
We are firmly entrenched in the next one. We are in the bigger and better era that can be traced in part to what went on in the smaller and lesser era that directly preceded it…but just in part, because these are very new, different and welcome times for this ballclub. These are times that would not be occurring if some astounding changes hadn’t been effected as this present era was rapidly developing into its own self.
If you need someone to link the era we left behind with the era we have entered, you could do worse than Bartolo Colon as your bridge. He is sturdy enough to handle the traffic. It is tempting to say he is bigger and better in 2015 than he was in 2014, but that probably applies mostly to his presence.
When Colon downed the Astros to end last year, it raised his won-lost mark was 15-13 and his ERA was 4.09. Thursday night, as he took care of the Braves on seven hits in six-and-two-third innings, Bartolo went to 14-11 and 4.13. There are more advanced metrics one could explore, figures that indicate he tends to drift onto the wrong side of average over the span of the long season, but Bartolo Colon predates the conception of most of those statistics. Measure Bartolo by traditional standards. He looks sharp as can be that way.
Bartolo’s basically the same pitcher he was when he arrived from Oakland at the beginning of 2014, charged with replacing an injured ace starter and maybe helping to lift a 74-88 outfit to slightly bigger and better things. He’s the same, but more so, you might say. He stays settled into his grooves longer, as attested to by his 31 consecutive scoreless innings, a streak snapped at last by a brief Brave uprising. He has become a perfectly decent-for-a-pitcher hitter, with his average of .148 demonstrating basic competence and his fourth-inning RBI less exotic than it would have seemed in the recent past. He still handles his position like a pro, hustling to first in the sixth to complete a 3-6-1 double play.
Colon’s doing what Colon does, except now he’s doing it for a first-place team that leads its division by a larger margin (7½ games) than at any juncture since 2006, back when he was a lad of 34 pitching for somebody else. Bart is 42 now, pitching his best baseball of the past two seasons for us at exactly the right moment. A moment when the bullpen needs a blow. A moment when the magic number could stand a little reduction. A moment when even a logical person intermittently in thrall to baseball superstition has to acknowledge there is a magic number at play and that it ticked down from 17 to 16 shortly after 12:30 Friday morning. Somewhere in the middle of all this activity, Bartolo Colon gave the Mets quality, distance and another nudge toward a title that was unthinkable a year ago at this moment.
The connection between the Mets striding almost unassailably atop their division and the presence of Colon among those very same Mets probably isn’t altogether coincidental.