The Mets have placed starting pitcher Bartolo Colon on revocable waivers, FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal tweets. Colon is in the first year of a two-year, $20MM deal that will pay him $11MM in 2015, so any team to claim him would risk being responsible for that salary. The Mets do, of course, retain the right to pull Colon back if any team claims him.
Exactly how teams will value Colon is unclear. He has performed fairly well this season, with a 3.85 ERA, 7.0 K/9 and an excellent 1.2 BB/9 in 161 1/3 innings so far, and seems, on the surface, to be worth his contract. He’s already 41, however, so some teams might view him with trepidation. One report last month indicated that the Mets would be willing to absorb about $2MM in salary if they traded Colon.
Besides the Mets, the team most obviously impacted by the news that Colon is on waivers is the Angels, who are looking for starting pitching after losing Garrett Richards to a season-ending injury. It’s unclear whether Colon will slip all the way to the Angels in the waiver process. As Rosenthal notes, he would have to pass through 28 teams before the Angels would have the chance to claim him. Given the likelihood that he would help a contending Angels team, that seems somewhat unlikely, but it’s not unheard of that Colon would make it that far — other contending teams passed on Marlon Byrd last year and allowed the Pirates to claim him, for example, even though Byrd didn’t have a significant salary.
