Since reviving his career with the Yankees in 2011, Bartolo Colon has only gotten better, and the right-hander tells Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle that he feels he can pitch for another three seasons. Colon added that if the A's are interested, he would like to return to Oakland for a third season (Twitter links).
Despite pitching most of the season at age 40, Colon enjoyed his finest season since 2005 with the Angels. Colon totaled 190 1/3 innings of 2.65 ERA ball, averaging 5.5 strikeouts and 1.4 walks per nine innings pitched with a 41.5 percent ground-ball rate. Colon's success is particularly intriguing given the fact that 85 percent of his pitches were either two-seam or four-seam fastballs.
Colon was mostly an afterthought from 2006-10 as he battled a host of shoulder and elbow injuries, but he underwent a stem cell treatment in the Dominican Republic in which doctors took fatty tissue and bone marrow from his hip and injected it into his ailing rotator cuff. Since then he's also been linked to PEDs, though he served a 50-game suspension last season, making it hard to imagine that he was using again in his superior 2013 campaign.
Colon earned just a $3MM base salary this year, though his contract reportedly contained incentives that could allow him to reach $5MM. Another one-year deal seems plausible as he enters his age-41 season, though his successful 2013 has likely earned him a raise. The A's are rich in young rotation options with the likes of Jarrod Parker, Sonny Gray, A.J. Griffin, Tommy Milone, Brett Anderson and Dan Straily, so it's unclear at this time whether retaining Colon's veteran presence will be of interest to general manager Billy Beane.
