Christian Colón: The EG Revue's Sportsperson of the Decade

The Twentybens: Ben Celebrates the Best of the 2010's

One of the great charms of baseball is that, more than any other sport, it affords the opportunity for unlikely heroism. It’s no great trick to design a basketball offense where LeBron takes the lion’s share of the shots, and Tom Brady throws all the Patriots’ passes (except, hilariously, when he doesn’t). But in baseball, once your best hitter bats, he doesn’t get another shot until everyone else in the lineup takes their turn. And if the game goes longer than expected, and a team runs out of all the pinch hitters they actually want to use, they have no choice but to let the last guy on the bench step up to the plate.

This brings me to Christian Colón, a local hero whose status as folk legend is only made possible by the egalitarianism of baseball. Colón absolutely should not be a mythic figure. He’s never been a regular major league starter. He’s played in parts of five seasons, but in none of those seasons did he ever appear in more than a third of his team’s games. He’s posted no steals and only one extra-base hit since 2017. His career slugging percentage is lower than his on-base percentage, which indicates a commitment to slap-hitting that would be more at home in the 1910’s than the 2010’s. He’s pretty good at defense, but he’s definitely not very good at defense.

Usually, when I am watching the worst professional athletes on their particular teams, the thought crosses my mind that, even in their high-profile failures, they are much better at what they do than I am what I do. But I’m honestly not sure that’s true of Colón. Being a tenured professor at the University of Central Missouri with a short stack of mostly second-tier journal articles to my name is probably the rough academic equivalent of getting 355 career MLB at-bats and hitting .256 with one homer.

Except...and here again is the glory of baseball and the privilege of athletes...on two nights, one in 2014 and one in 2015, Colón had a shot to write himself into baseball history, and he bullseyed immortality both times.

On the evening of September 30, 2014, Colón spent several hours doing exactly what the majority of Kansas Citians were doing: he sat on his butt and watched a baseball game. Indeed, if the Wild Card playoff game against Oakland—KC’s first playoff game since Back to the Future came out—had ended in nine innings, Colón would never have left the bench. But in the bottom of the 10th, he entered the game to pinch-hit for another benchwarmer, short person Terrance Gore, who had come in to pinch run in the 8th, and who is such a terrible hitter that he makes Colón look like Mike Schmidt. Colón looked less Schmidtian when he was immediately asked to sacrifice bunt, but at least he did so successfully.

His bunting complete, Colón went back to the dugout...and then he hung out for a while. Gore had pinch-run for Billy Butler, which meant Colón took Butler’s slot in the lineup, which meant Colón was now quite possibly the least-fearsome Designated Hitter in the history of the American League. But the game kept going and going, and in the 12th, Oakland took the lead, and KC had to score to survive. Eric Hosmer, a large man who hits baseballs very far and who once lived in a fancy apartment above a fancy restaurant that specializes in selling marked-up offal to yuppies,[1] came just a few inches short of hitting a game-tying homer, and he was standing at third when Colón came up with one out. Then this happened:

As I study that replay, I’m pretty sure that after leaving Colón’s bat, the ball makes initial contact with the earth approximately an inch in front of home plate. Fortunately, the ball bounced very high, giving everyone enough time to advance a base, and Christian Colón, a rookie backup infielder with six career RBI’s to that point, was standing on first base with a game-tying RBI in an extra-inning sudden-death playoff game.

With two outs, Colón stole second base, which is also unusual—he still only has five career stolen bases. The steal was vital, since it allowed him to score when Salvador Perez poked the biggest Royals hit in a generation into left field.

Perez and relief pitcher Brandon Finnegan are probably the most-remembered heroes of that game, but nevertheless, Colón had played an essential role in one of the unlikeliest victories in playoff history (per Baseball Reference, the Royals had a 3 percent chance to win at the end of the 7th). Having accomplished this, he did next-to-nothing for the rest of the 2014 postseason, taking the field only to play defense for half an inning in Game 2 of the ALCS (the Orioles didn’t hit the ball his way).

Indeed, during KC’s magical playoff runs of 2014 and 2015, after Colón’s game-tying RBI in the Wild Card game, the Royals played 282 innings of postseason baseball before he had another chance to bat.

That next at-bat was on a considerably larger stage: the 12th inning of Game 5 of the World Series, with the Royals only one win away from their first championship since the year Cyndi Lauper released “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.”[2] The Royals had been in pretty dire straits in this game as well—the Mets had a 95 percent chance to win the game as late as the middle of the 8th inning. But KC fought their way back via the idiot savant baserunning that had become their hallmark. Colón came in to pinch-hit for the pitcher in a tie game with a runner on third and one out, and this time he managed to hit the ball a bit more squarely than he had 13 months earlier in the Wild Card game:

The Mets melted down at this point and the Royals ran out to a 7-2 lead before they were done, but the fact remains that the go-ahead RBI of a decisive World Series game was driven in by the player who was least likely even to get into the game. He came around to score a run of his own when Alcides Escobar drove him in, and then he went back to the bench and was replaced by relief pitcher Wade Davis in the bottom of the inning. As with the Wild Card game, Colón is not really the player lodged in the cultural memory of Game 5—in KC, it’s remembered mostly for “Hosmer’s Mad Dash;” in Flushing, I’m sure it’s the “Lucas F-ing Duda” game. But when called upon, Colón got it done.

Four years later, the Royals’ moment in the sun seems even more bizarre as MLB has returned to being a league dominated by power hitters and big markets. As for Colón, he did not play in the majors at all in 2018, and he appeared in only eight games for the sub-.500 Reds in 2019. But if it turns out that Colón is done, his postseason batting record will be forever pristine: 2 at-bats, 2 hits, 2 RBI’s, 2 runs, 1 steal, 1 sacrifice hit, 2 pennants, 1 World Series ring. Not half-bad for a footnote.

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[1] Fwiw, The Rieger is very good.

[2] I hadn’t realized it before, but 1985 was a heck of a year for Hollywood comedies aimed at ten year-olds. Also, I know the following opinion is indefensible, but “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough” is definitely my favorite Lauper song. Unlike Colón, it’s a banger.