The major baseball news from yesterday is that Corey Kluber, a two-time Cy Young Award winner, is retiring. He will be remembered for his years of domination in Cleveland, but he also delivered the Yankees’ first no-hitter of the twenty-first century in May 2021. We’ll have more on it later today, but for now, best wishes to a genuinely terrific pitcher.
Today on the site, Noah will conclude his two-part Book Club discussion of Jane Leavy’s superb biography of Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy, while Andrés will pay respect to Kluber’s brief but memorable Yankees tenure, which included more than just the no-hitter. Later on, Estevão will discuss the fascinating journeys of various first-round picks from the past 12 years to the Yankees rotation, Sam will wrap up our PSA Top 100 Honorable Mentions, and Peter will consider how the PECOTA and FanGraphs projections reflect the Yankees front office’s perhaps-too-comfortable satisfaction.
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Former Mets pitcher talks up about adverse PED test: “I was ashamed to tell my father.”
Bartolo Colon’s father was playing Dominoes in the Dominican countryside when his phone rang.
Colon had adopted a lovable character with the Mets two years prior, in 2012. He tested positive for synthetic testosterone, a banned chemical in Major League Baseball, a month and a half earlier.
Colon, humiliated by his actions, fled to the Bahamas with his wife after being sentenced to a 50-game suspension. While there, he dreaded telling his father.
“What hurt me the most was having to tell my father about my positive test,” Colon stated while seated across from Pedro Martinez on the “Alofoke” show, a Dominican YouTube show. “We were raised humbly and honestly, and I was embarrassed. It took me a month and a half to get the confidence to inform my father. I couldn’t find a way to inform him.
When Colon’s father finally answered the phone, he begged to go somewhere private. He broke the news to his father, but he didn’t understand. He assumed Colon had been caught using some type of illegal drug and was relieved to hear it was only a performance booster.
Colon’s decision to take PEDs lost him a shot at the Hall of Fame — he garnered only 1.3% of the vote on his first ballot in 2024 — but when he initially opened up about PEDs, all he could recollect was a phone call from his father.
Colon is the winningest Dominican-born pitcher in Major League Baseball history. In 565 career games, he went 247-188 with a 4.12 ERA and 2,532 strikeouts; his Hall candidacy was questioned without the banned substance, which he claims he used to keep healthy after missing the 2010 season.
“I used it to stay healthy,” Colon explained. “It was a bad choice I made, but I don’t regret doing it because I made the decision, I have to live with it.”
