Things Learned Along the Way

There has to be a Met fan out there who got stuck with an uncooperative schedule and plopped down on the couch or in the stands after the first inning.

Sorry pal — you missed a lot.

You missed David Wright walloping a pitch over the Great Wall of Flushing, followed two batters later by Yoenis Cespedes unloading, followed by Lucas Duda hitting a tracer off the face of whatever they’re calling the Pepsi Porch now. Boom boom boom — 16 pitches, three home runs, and poor Mike Foltynewicz was stuck out there worrying that the next batter might leave him lying on his back surrounded by clothing like Charlie Brown.

Hokusai might have been inspired to paint Three Views of Met Fury, as every home run was different: Wright’s was a majestically clubbed rain-bringer, Cespedes’s an almost perfect mathematical arc ending in the stands, and Duda’s one of his signature inside-out line drives, less a parabola than a straight line between bat and whatever it dented.

That was pretty much it if your tastes ran to offense, but the pitching side offered more subtle pleasures, as it belonged to Bartolo Colon.

If the Mets were transformed into the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band, Bartolo would be Charlie Watts, keeping time with a bemused smirk as his flashier bandmates strutted and preened in the spotlight. He’s imperturbable when things go badly and calm to the point of bland when things go well. You get the impression he’s not particularly thrilled by the raucous applause that greets his dislodged helmets and thunderous routes to cover first, but he’s willing to shrug it off. Let those who only see that much feel they got their money’s worth; he’ll be putting on a quietly amazing display for those who know what to look for.

Colon threw 99 pitches Monday; 92 of them were fastballs. (Tip to SNY’s Nelson Figueroa for the postgame note.) Granted, with Bartolo a fastball is less a single pitch than an ongoing improvisation for speed, movement and location. But still, 92 out of 99? That’s crazy — in an era of specialization and expanding arsenals, Colon succeeds with a basic formula that long-gone generations of pitchers would greet with a nod. (So too with recently departed ones — Monday’s victory was Colon’s 220th, pushing him past Pedro Martinez to become the second-winningest Dominican starter.)

There’s a story about Cy Young I assume is apocryphal but worth telling anyway. Some painfully young reporter came up to him after a loss and started asking questions that were clearly stretching for gravitas and meaning, causing a weary Young to give the kid the side eye and harrumph, “Son, I’ve lost more games than you’ve seen.”

If Colon hasn’t heard that one, I imagine he’d appreciate it. He’s started 472 big-league games, which means he’s seen everything baseball can do to a pitcher: losing 1-0 despite unhittable stuff, winning 11-6 with nothing, seeing games barfed away on errors or sabotaged by bad luck, falling into a win because of the other team’s misfortune or lousy weather, and so on. And yeah, he’s undoubtedly seen teammates beat the tar out of some newcomer so he winds up batting in the first and then cruises through however many innings his body allows.

You can’t surprise him any longer, so he goes out and pitches, sizing up the opposing lineup, trying out what he has, and then tinkering from there. Colon knows sometimes his assortment of fastballs will be disobedient and drift over the fat part of the plate, leading to bad things. He knows even punchless teams can cluster hits and walk away with a victory — just as he knows they’re more likely to scatter them and wind up with nothing. By now he’s seen it all, even if you haven’t. Your mouth may be hanging open in disbelief, but Bartolo’s reaction will probably be a blink-and-you-missed-it smile or a little shrug — oh right, this again. And then he’ll get on with it, like he has so many times before.