By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2016/11/11/two-different-ex-mets-become-two-different-braves/The rebuilding Braves decided a little senior leadership on the mound was what their budding pitching corps needs. So
they signed the two oldest active major league pitchers this week. R.A. Dickey, the knuckleball specialist and erstwhile Cy
Young Award winner (2012), signed for one year and $8 million guaranteed. And Bartolo Colon, erstwhile Cy Young Award
winner (2005), has signed for one year and $12.5 guaranteed.
Both signings ensure the Braves’ younger arms will be mentored by former Mets. If they happen to win some games while
they’re at it, that’s a plus. But you won’t find two pitchers who left the Mets in more differing conditions when they did leave.
Dickey
found himself trashed in print by one New York sports columnist before he was traded to the Blue Jays in December
2012. The righthander was a feel-good story as a Met, turning his childhood sexual abuse victimhood into assorted doings on
behalf of fighting that and human trafficking, writing a memoir on a publisher’s invitation in which he purged his ancient
nightmares and described a spiritual re-awakening.
Then, at a Mets party thrown for children victimised by Hurricane Sandy, reporters asked Dickey—who was negotiating a contract
extension with the Mets at the time, still—about the status of the talks. Intending nothing nasty, Dickey replied that if they
couldn’t agree on an extension he was likely to test free agency when the incumbent deal expired.
For that, and for his alleged self-promotion regarding the earlier matters,
New York Post columnist Ken Davidoff attacked Dickey’s
“true character ” coming forth through his “laughable threat,” never mind that he spoke matter of factly and not threateningly.
Davidoff never explained why it was unseeming for a player to answer such a question in an “inappropriate” place but not for a
reporter to ask the question.
For the record, the extension Dickey sought was two years and $26 million. In that time and place it was actually a case of Dickey
offering a bargain to keep him a Met (he’d actually been slightly better in 2010-12 than Zack Greinke, who’d just signed his
gigabucks deal with the Dodgers), and there was only a $6 million difference between what he wanted and what the Mets offered.
And if Dickey was such a pariah for self promotion,
as the New York Times‘ Tyler Kepner noted, it shouldn’t have been “fine for
David Wright, their new $138 million player, to visit David Letterman and Jon Stewart, as he has done in the past. Yet when Dickey
appears on the same shows, as he has this off-season, he’s full of himself. Please.” Kepner was zapping the Mets’ attitude, not
Davidoff’s, but the Mets said nothing about the Davidoff hit.
Dickey brought back Noah Syndergaard and Travis d’Arnaud, who’d become a Blue Jay in the first place in the deal that made a
Phillie of long-since retired Roy Halladay. Syndergaard, of course, has come up huge for the Mets since making the club; d’Arnaud
has had his usefulnesses but hasn’t shaken out as a top grade catcher.
As a Blue Jay, Dickey’s first three seasons were more than serviceable but even knuckleball pitchers who don’t have to fear their
arms blowing up begin to show their age in due course, which is what happened in 2016. But you can bet he’s leaving Toronto
under a lot less grief than he left New York.
Colon, by contrast, leaves New York with nothing but hosannas. He wasn’t just an innings-eating veteran who knew how to win, he
was a character—even more so than in his Cy Young Award season with the Angels a decade earlier—who was good for a laugh, a
smile, or a dropped jaw, sometimes all three at once.
Baseball’s ancient mariner, Colon even made the National League All-Star team in 2016 while finishing 15-8 with a respectable 3.43
earned run average. Clearly he was useful on the mound and as a mentor, not to mention playmate, but as an anonymous scout told
the
Post, “Colon just knows how to pitch, but at some point I would be leery. So I understand why the Mets didn’t go there. Colon
gets by on guile.”
That’s almost debatable. The worst kept secret in the National League during Colon’s tenure as a Met was that he had nothing left but
his brains. His fastball wouldn’t pass a street sweeper at top speed; his breaking balls were easier to read than
The Cat in the Hat.
But that was the thing. This un-catlike old cat still knew how to out-think hitters, and he taught the young Met guns with the speed-of-
light repertoires how to marry their brains to their bullets. He might resemble a canister vacuum cleaner with legs, but he had value
you couldn’t put a price tag on to the kids on the hill.
And therein lies the reason Colon is no longer a Met. They have enough young starters of above-average achievement or potential to
stock a kindergarten. When their well enough known young Turks went down with injuries this year, they had enough graduating from
kindergarten to step in and step up. The old man had to graduate; it wouldn’t look right to bust him back to grammar school.
Colon even shamed the younger kids now and then, not that they felt ashamed, by occasional feats even younger players don’t always
commit, even as he also amused them with comical ineptitude at certain times. For every time he lost his batting helmet twice in a single
plate appearance (it happened against Edinson Volquez, then with the Pirates, in 2014), there was a run to the first base line to field
a lazy dribbler and throw the batter out with a
behind-the-back flip.
And who the hell was he to square up James Shields this past May, with Kevin Plawecki on second and two out in the top of the second,
and hit one off the facade of the lower metal supply company seats in Petco Park? Only the oldest man in baseball history to hit his first
major league bomb. It took him about a month to round the bases.
His teammates didn’t exactly mind. Now we’ll see how Colon’s ageless wonder act plays in Atlanta. For the longest time the Braves had
an image as professionals so severe you wondered if their kangaroo court fined players for daring to have a good time while playing a
game they treated as work that was about as much fun as thoracic surgery.
It brought the Braves long-term success but didn’t exactly make them loveable. They even turned Roger McDowell, once a fun-loving,
Ph.D-in-pranks Met relief pitcher, into a dour pitching coach. Once he hits the Braves, Colon just might achieve the impossible. The
tomahawk chop might not be succeeded by a whoopee cushion, but the Braves might learn how to win without being boring old farts.
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Colon throwing a runner out behind his back.
Dickey winning his 20th in 2012 en route his Cy Young as a Met.
Which one's Bart? ;)
