You Don't Have to Look the Part

Never judge a ballplayer by their belt size.

If this photo doesn’t scream “world class athlete,” I don’t know what does. (Image credit: Adam Hunger / USA TODAY Sports)

I never had the look of an athlete. It wasn’t that I was necessarily unathletic. I actually think I was pretty decent, considering my lack of natural gifts. I was solid in little league, could hold my own on a playground court or backyard football. Hell, I even started on my freshman basketball team. We were terrible, but that’s beside the point.

No one ever sized me up and thought, “We need to look out for this kid.” I was skinny, sometimes outright gangly, lacked speed, and my muscles were more theoretical than anything. I wanted so badly to prove the doubters wrong and show them looks can be deceiving, but I couldn’t. I just didn’t have it in me. I knew from a young age I was going to have to pay my bills with my brain instead of my athletic ability. Results on that have been mixed, so let’s not dwell on it.

I wasn’t an exception, but sports have always featured players who didn’t look the part of an elite athlete, yet proved otherwise with their performance. Baseball has often been a leader in this area, because let’s face it, you don’t have to look like a Greek god to be a great baseball player. This isn’t a knock on the athleticism of baseball players, it’s just a quirk of the game itself, though one that is definitely becoming less prevalent as fields like nutrition and conditioning advance.

I suppose there’s two ways to look at it. On the one hand, thank God conditioning was primitive back in the 1920’s or Babe Ruth may never have been given a chance. On the other hand, perhaps Ruth would have been even greater if he’d taken better care of himself. It couldn’t have hurt, but I’m not convinced the two necessarily go hand in hand. After all, there was truth in John Kruk’s words when he replied to a woman who scolded him for smoking with, “I ain’t an athlete, lady. I’m a ballplayer.” Kruk was no Adonis, but man, could he hit a baseball. And he was underrated in lots of other aspects of the game as well.*

*Did you know Kruk had only four less triples in his career than Ken Griffey Jr.? And Griffey played more than a decade longer. I don’t know why, but I always get a kick out of that.

Closer to home, I think of Mike Moustakas, the third baseman for the Royals 2014-15 championship teams. One look at Moose told you he didn’t spend all of his free time in the weight room, and he caught a lot of flak for this when he first arrived in the majors and struggled out of the gate. But he figured it out at the plate, became an All-Star, and had a successful career as a cornerstone for a championship team. He also moved surprisingly well and could flash the glove better than a man of his build had any right to.

But there is no better recent example of this phenomenon than “Big Sexy” himself, Bartolo Colon. The nickname was both sarcastic and complementary, because Colon looked like a guy who’d be more at home working as a hot dog vendor at the ballpark than taking the bump. This was not the case, however.

Colon debuted for Cleveland’s AL championship team in 1997, and went on to pitch for 21 major league seasons. He’s no longer in MLB, but he hasn’t stopped pitching. At last check, Colon pitched this winter at the age of 50 for the Karachi Monarchs of Baseball United, a new startup league based in the Middle East and South Asia. And from the footage I’ve seen, Big Sexy can still sling it.

His MLB career was one of ups and downs, but the fact that he didn’t look like a traditional big league pitcher never held him back. If anything, it only increased his renown when he regularly showcased his flashiness, wowing anyone who’d ever doubted him. He was always doing something highlight reel-worthy, like making an over-the-shoulder catch running off the mound, or nonchalantly flipping the ball behind his back to first to get an out. His greatest highlight may have come in San Diego in 2016, when he took James Shields deep and became the oldest player to ever hit his first career home run at the age of 42.

Not all the notoriety he received was positive though. Living up to his Big Sexy reputation, he was sued for child support by his mistress, exposing an affair. On the field, he battled injuries, and was suspended after testing positive for synthetic testosterone in 2012. No one who ever saw Colon would claim he was a juicer — he was most likely using it to recover from his injuries more quickly, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was illegal, and it put a permanent blotch on his reputation.

I don’t know if Colon cares about that. He was always about playing the game and having a good time, and for stretches of his impressive career, he was downright dominant. In that same 2012 season, he set a record for most consecutive strikes thrown with 38 against the Angels. That’s kind of ridiculous. And in 2005, while a member of the Angels, he won the AL Cy Young Award.

He finished up in 2018 — he and then-Ranger teammate Adrian Beltre were the last active MLB players from the ‘90s that season — with a record of 247-188, 4.12 ERA in 565 games and 3,461.2 innings pitched. Colon struck out 2,535 with a 1.312 WHIP, worth 46.2 WAR. Beltre was elected into the Hall of Fame this year, which will probably never happen for Colon, regardless of his PED bust, but Big Sexy was no slouch.

He might not have always looked good doing it, but no can argue he didn’t do it damn well.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. What are your thoughts on Bartolo Colon? Who are some other players who didn’t look like elite athletes, but kicked ass anyway? Leave your thoughts in the comments.