Bartolo Colon is certainly not making it easy for the New York Yankees to keep him out of their starting rotation. Six one-run innings Monday night against Tampa Bay lowered his Spring Training ERA to 2.66 over 15 innings.
Spring Training began with jokes about how wide Colon is. Or how old he is (he will be 38 in a couple of months). Or, how the Yankees had to be desperate to give a shot to a guy who had not pitched in the big leagues since the middle of the 2009 season. Or how, with Colon, Mark Prior and Freddy Garcia the Yankees had baseball’s best 2003 rotation.
Well, no one is laughing at Colon right now. He might just be in the process of pitching Garcia, who won 12 games for the Chicago White Sox a year ago, off the Yankee roster. Garcia has a 5.93 ERA for the Spring and, as Pinstripe Alley said, Colon has out-pitched him “in every way imaginable.”
What the Yankees choose to do here will certainly be interesting. Colon, though, could not have done a better job stating his case.