Bartolo Colon is too fun to trade

It’s either that the metaphors don’t work, or work entirely too well. In the gathering windiness before the MLB trade deadline, players on the market are sniffed around or circled or pursued or subjected to rounds of evaluative tire-kicks. This is not a nice way to treat a person, obviously, and not even really a very good way to treat a used car. It’s how business gets done in the business of baseball, and in the frantic moment around the deadline all that churning is fun to watch. But the squickiness that seeps into the language we use to talk about it is not an accident.

There are no pleasant metaphors for things like acquiring another person, and the literal, de-metaphored thing of it sounds even worse. It’s a harsh thing to uproot some number of lives because of a perceived long-shot chance at a wild card bid or because an embattled GM is trying to keep a gig or to save a distant billionaire some money. That it’s how things work makes it familiar, but it doesn’t really make it less strange.

The New York Mets front office, we might as well assume, had their own baseball reasons for not trading Bartolo Colon at last week’s deadline. They also had baseball reasons for thinking about trading him, and if the team deals him through waivers it will have baseball reasons for that, too. You already know what those reasons would be, just as surely as everyone who cares and thinks and talks and reads about baseball does.

Still, a baseball team’s business is not ours, and for most of us baseball is not only or even mostly a business. Fans can afford to feel and think in a way that front offices cannot; that feeling is either sentimentality or a more human emotional clarity, or more likely one with heavy notes of the other. We can bring a lightness and pleasure to our experience of baseball -- we should, anyway, or else it’s hard to see the point -- that those working in it cannot. The baseball considerations are the baseball considerations, and are finally someone else’s job.

It is easier to cheer for a team that wins than it is for one that doesn’t, which explains why so many millions of people do that. We’re entitled to a squint or an ugh or a judgy nose-shrivel when these Count The Ringz types arrogate the “we” with regards to the collection of athletically superhuman millionaire strangers that most align with some imagined personal brand. That’s an extremely corny thing to do, and we might as well laugh at it. But if they’re making a different choice than we -- Fans Of Distinction that we all are -- might make, they are just answering the same question differently.

At some point our baseball teams are mostly TV shows that we watch and read about; they are stories that we like hearing over and over again, and which we make about ourselves in various ways. The idea is to enjoy ourselves, in whatever way we can best do that; that can be by diving into the statistical weeds or waiting on hold for 75 minutes to pitch an unrealistic trade to Smugs and The Belch on the local sports-talk radio station. The important thing is to add something to our lives, to feel more and maybe feel better because of baseball.

Those are our baseball reasons, such as they are. And so the reasons that I have for being glad that the Mets did not trade Bartolo Colon, for instance, are not strictly baseball reasons as we are given to understand that term.

★★★

There is also Bartolo Colon as pitcher-of-baseballs, which is a different thing. No other pitcher pitches the way that Colon does, both in terms of repertoire -- since 2007, per Brooks Baseball, 84 percent of Colon’s pitches have been fastballs, either of the sinking or four-seam variety -- and general attitudinal vibe. Colon’s control could be described as painterly, but his approach is more that of a house painter idly air-guitaring to Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” on a smoke break. That this all works as well as it does -- and Colon is still a very effective pitcher at the doorstep of 300 pounds and at 41 years and 2 months of age -- is a testament to his wildly specific and uncommon talent.

That all that undeniable effectiveness seems almost incidental and semi-accidental, on the other hand, is a testament to Colon’s approach. Colon is weirdly, fantastically chilled out on the mound; his affectlessness seems to owe less to having achieved entry to some sort of competitive Intensity Zone and more to an authentic lack of worry. He tosses and bounces the ball around idly between pitches, never displays more excitement than can be seen on the face of someone waiting to pay at The Container Store, and applauds fine defensive plays behind him with little mini golf claps that would be understated at Augusta National. When his helmet flops over his eyes on an errant swing, Colon laughs.

For all there is to admire in the pyrotechnics of great young athletes doing the big, loud things that great young athletes do, there is something equally awe-inspiring, if quieter, about Bartolo Colon’s exquisite casualness. To win matchups and win games by doing what Colon does requires a pitcher to be both much nervier and much calmer than most humans can manage. He has an unremarkable fastball that the best baseball players in the world have a hard time hitting well. Colon wins with it because he anticipates and teases and exploits; all his knockouts arrive via counterpunch.

So what makes Colon a good pitcher is also what makes him such a fascinating one. He is fun to watch, but he is also weird to watch. The beats are in the wrong place, he is always either early or late in various ways, and uses his own weird ease in his own weirdness to create wrong-footed unease in those hitting against him. We know that this works well enough, and have statistics that can show and prove as much. But that is a different thing than saying what Colon is worth.

Some numbers explain what he is worth to the team that’s paying him, and others can situate him on the continuum of his big league peers. If the Mets do eventually trade him, it will be for players whose numerical contributions, when added up, will equal more than what Colon provides. That he is so undeniably unique does not mean he cannot be replaced by a player who provides similar value.

But the value that Colon adds to his team on the field is not the same thing as -- and not nearly equal to -- his value to those who enjoy watching him do the thing he does in the way that only he does it. This is a distinction, and it’s a difference.

There’s obviously no need to tell baseball fans why or how to enjoy Bartolo Colon, because we are mostly doing an excellent job of that already. It’s quite possible that Bartolo Colon is worth less in baseball’s executive suites than he is to people who care about and enjoy watching strange and engaging baseball. This does not mean that their reasoned accountings are any more correct than our unreasoned, affection-driven ones. It does not mean that the value Bartolo Colon provides simply by being his strange, inimitable, backhandedly awe-inspiring self is any less real than its decimal-pointed numerical quantifications.

Here, in this game, we might as well allow ourselves to escape the hard reason and cold business that circumscribes and dictates so much else that goes on around us. We might as well hold on to what we’ve got, and we might as well appreciate what it’s worth, for as long as summer and our own good luck allows.