By the end of July, Bartolo Colon’s ERA had risen to 3.58. There were questions of whether his time finally was up halfway through his 18th major league season.
Six weeks later, it’s clear that talk was premature.
The hefty, 43-year-old right-hander continued to be a marvel Friday night, tossing seven shutout innings in the Mets’ 3-0 victory over the Twins to open a 10-game homestand at Citi Field.
“We just keep looking at him and wondering when it’s not going to happen anymore, and I’m not sure anybody has an idea,” Mets manager Terry Collins said of Colon, who has a 2.21 ERA since Aug. 1, spanning nine starts. “I think it’s going to be there for a long time.
“I said it a while ago, with all that happened this year, if we didn’t have him in our rotation, I don’t know where we would be right now.”
Colon allowed just three singles, walked two and struck out six, and lowered his ERA to 3.14 while improving to 14-7. He kept his opponent scoreless for the second time in three starts, after blanking the Reds over six innings on Sept. 5 in Cincinnati. He has won 43 games since joining the Mets in 2014, the fifth-most in baseball in that time.
Colon’s only jam came in the third, when he loaded the bases with two outs. But he escaped the inning unscathed by getting third-place hitter Jorge Polanco to fly out weakly to left field. Only two more Twins reached against him — Max Kepler on a Yoenis Cespedes error and Polanco on a single — as Colon navigated the final four frames without a runner getting to second base.
He needed just 40 pitches to get through his final four innings, and he threw just five pitches in the seventh. This was trademark Colon, mixing high-80s fastballs to both sides of the plate, working ahead, and keeping the ball down, at the knees or below.
“That’s just him, that’s what he does when he’s on,” Collins said. “He pitches to both side of the plate, all four sections of the strike zone.”
Colon’s most impressive play came in the first. After he walked Joe Mauer, Polanco hit a groundball to his right. Colon deftly fielded it and threw an on-the-move, off-balance strike to shortstop Asdrubal Cabrera to start a 1-6-3 double play.
“That’s a routine play,” Colon said with a smirk through a translator. “I always do that.”