MLB flashback: Remembering Bartolo Colon’s incredible home run
Today marks the two-year anniversary of one of the greatest moments in MLB history: An unbelievable home run by Bartolo Colon.
One of the greatest aspects of the MLB is that each team plays 162 games. On any given day, there are up to 15 games and endless opportunities for incredible feats to occur. Baseball, deemed “America’s Pastime,” has been played for centuries, yet various firsts occur each season.
Several firsts have already occurred in 2018, mostly regarding Shohei Ohtani, but none of them even begin to compare to what happened on this date in 2016.
On May 7, 2016, New York Mets starting pitcher Bartolo Colon made history.
Playfully nicknamed “Big Sexy,” Colon is not the most athletic player in the league. He is listed at 5’11, 285 pounds, which is significantly heavier than the 185 pounds he weighed when he entered the league in 1997. Add in the fact that he is well into his forties, and it becomes marvelous that he is still playing, let alone producing.
But on May 7, 2016, Colon hit a home run. It was not just any home run; it was the first of his career.
“The impossible has happened!”
Pitchers homer all the time. Not every pitcher is Madison Bumgarner, who is capable of crushing five long balls per year, but several pitchers run into one each year. Colon, on the other hand, had gone 19 years without hitting a home run.
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Then, Colon crushed a James Shields fastball deep into the San Diego sky for the first home run of his career.
Kirk Gibson‘s legendary walk-off home run in the 1988 World Series holds the crown for the greatest homer of all-time, but Colon’s comes close. Serving as the poster boy for the National League adopting the designated hitter, Colon is the last player you would expect to go deep.
To make Colon’s home run even better, it won the game for the Mets. It was responsible for their third and fourth runs of the night, and they eventually won by the score of 6-3.
Although Colon’s home run was astounding, his trot and celebration were even more glorious. Rounding the bases in a whopping 30.5 seconds, it is safe to say he took his time. All the while, his teammates were losing their minds in the dugout, and the fans in San Diego could not help but cheer.
It is not often that a stadium erupts for an opposing player’s home run, but Colon deserved that and more.
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Bartolo Colon has not homered since, and, considering he is now in the American League, there is a good chance that he will never homer again. He has given the baseball world a lot throughout his career that has now eclipsed two decades, but that home run will go down as one of his most significant accomplishments and one of the greatest moments in baseball history.