“It’s out of here! Bartolo has done it! The impossible has happened! […] This is one of the great moments in the history of baseball!”
It may seem like it was a thousand years ago at this point, but it was in fact four years ago today that Bartolo Colon hit his first (and last, probably) home run at the ripe age of 42.
Colon made a name for himself during his three years with the Mets, not just as a reliable innings eater, but as a laughably poor hitter, as his helmet would frequently fly off in his feeble attempts to make contact. In fact, coming into his jaw- dropping at-bat, he had gone 0-for-9 with six strikeouts.
But with the Mets already up 2-0 in the top of the third inning, and Kevin Plawecki standing on second base, Colon temporarily made the Earth freeze as he flailed at a pitch from James Shields and tucked it into the left field corner, leaving even poor Shields shaken and dumfounded at what we had all just witnessed.
It couldn’t have been any more shocking for me personally, as I was lucky enough to be in attendance for that game at Petco Park in San Diego. While going to any baseball game is always exciting, I could have never expected the eventual thrill of what was to come.
I was at the game with my parents and my grandma, and we had tickets in right field with the 7-Line Army. So, despite in San Diego, we were surrounded by hordes of loud and passionate Mets fans, who brought an unrivaled sense of energy and excitement to every pitch. Sitting in a sea of orange and blue while on the road was already a Mets fan’s dream.
When Colon initially struck the ball, I think every person in the stadium did a collective eye-rub to make sure they were seeing what they thought they were seeing. The initial shock of the moment quickly turned into excitement, and for a few moments, the stadium was amongst the loudest I’ve ever heard a stadium. There wasn’t a soul sitting down, as every Mets fans jumped out of their seat and just let it all out, going absolutely ballistic and screaming at the top of their lungs while proudly waving the large cardboard cutout of his face.
I remember my dad looking down at me with a look of genuine shock and mystification overriding his face. Even my grandma, who didn’t know a lot about the Mets, could understand the insane significance of what had just occurred, as the entire building had transformed into a frenzy in nothing more than a split second.
Even the Padres fans in the stadium couldn’t help but laugh as Colon slowly trudged his way around the bases, taking his sweet time and letting it all soak in as his teammates prepared to mob him in the dugout. Gary Cohen’s quote, “The impossible has happened!” just about sums it up and will live on forever as maybe not the most important moment in Mets history, but certainly one of the most wild, random, and unlikely moments.
Colon wasn’t the greatest Met of all time, but he sure did leave a large impact for the time he was here and definitely made a lot of people smile. Regardless of your thoughts on him now, it is undeniable that he momentarily shook the baseball world with his goofy antics and achieved one of the most statistically unlikely and baffling accomplishments in baseball history.
