How two 40-something All-Stars are shattering expectations

SAN DIEGO – So, about the outfit. Understand, David Ortiz shows up every year looking like this. He didn’t just decide to celebrate his final All-Star Game by wearing pants that registered somewhere on the Pantone chart between magenta and hot pink. And the two buttons undone on his black shirt – that’s just Big Papi business casual. He wore aviator sunglasses despite more-than-ample lighting in the ballroom at the Manchester Grand Hyatt. Among the chunky bracelet on his right wrist, the bejeweled watch on his left and the chains around his neck, Ortiz looked like the love child of Iceberg Slim and Mr. T.

Bartolo Colon wore no gold or pink; he looked like he was decked out in Casual Male XL’s clearance items. The only uglier get-up seen Monday was the All-Star Game uniform. Colon’s striped polo did spare the world a keen look at his torso by offering just one open button, which was kind. His sunglasses sat on the table in front of him. The closest Colon came to showy was the Fitbit Charge HR on his left wrist. To which the obvious follow-up was: Bartolo Colon, the worst body in baseball, has a Fitbit?

Get two 40-somethings at the same All-Star Game and weird things happen. Ortiz and Colon flip the script on so much conventional wisdom about baseball and fandom. Both are ancient in baseball years. Neither speaks English as a first language, which so many in baseball worry can turn fans off. Both have tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. And yet here they are, in the twilight of their careers, two of the most popular players in the game, Ortiz the best hitter in baseball this season, Colon among its biggest surprises as a stalwart starting pitcher at an age by which most arms have quit.

Trying to account for their shared popularity isn’t altogether difficult. Ortiz might be the most beloved Red Sox ever because of his disposition, his swagger, his aura and his hand in bringing them three championships – the sorts of things age doesn’t kill and PEDs don’t dent.

“I’m a lovely person, man,” Ortiz said. “I try to be sweet. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. And people understand that. I am who I am. Some people like it, some people don’t. But I’d say more people like it than don’t.”

“He goes out there and enjoys himself,” Colon said. “They see him enjoying himself and having fun. And enjoying yourself and having fun doesn’t mean you’re not paying attention to your work and doing that well. It means you’re really enjoying it that much and it comes across.”

The case of Colon isn’t quite the fairy tale of Ortiz. He was essentially out of baseball until undergoing controversial stem-cell treatment. He returned, made himself into a serviceable starter despite throwing fastballs about 85 percent of the time and turned into an archetypal cult hero of the 2010s: neither drugs nor sex – Colon, according to a lawsuit, carried on a double life with a second family – could break Colon. If anything, the scandals burnished him.

Because Colon did something almost unimaginable: He made fat cool.

“Bartolo works so hard,” Mets teammate Jeurys Familia said. “That’s just the body God gave to him.”

This is not exactly true. It’s the story that attached itself to Colon, though, and that he weathered all of the potential landmines to find himself here, ready to pitch against Ortiz in the All-Star Game that starts Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET, is a testament to brilliant marketing, blind luck or, likeliest, the truth that fans would rather laugh at a fat guy who used PEDs than demonize him, which makes for some sort of moral cognitive dissonance inside of baseball.

“He’s a teddy bear,” Ortiz explained. “ … At the end of the day, he’s a good guy. And if he’s a good guy, you can never fake that.”

While Colon is king of the meme, climber of the Vine, the GIF distilled to its essence – a creation, in every way, of social media, without which Bartolo Colon would be some guy who eats too much and not a man whose home run earlier this year was one of the biggest plays of the first half – he is also limited by the size of those circles in which his name travels. They’re passionate. They’re also insular.

Ortiz, on the other hand, is the opium of the people, his die-hards not confined to Boston but all across the country.

“My son Cooper wants to meet Ortiz so bad,” reigning NL Cy Young winner Jake Arrieta said. “He’s been talking about it for weeks.”

It is, presumably, his last chance – and presumably only because, as his former Red Sox teammate Jon Lester put it, “I’m not 100 percent sold it is his last year.” Ortiz is doing the victory lap, soaking in the admiration and coming off the single best half of his career, a .332/.426/.682 tour de force that stirred questions about whether he should retire.

“I got to spend some time with his last week,” Colon said. “We talked a lot. I was telling him not to retire yet. He’s still got so much to give. Especially after how well he’s been playing. I don’t think he should go yet. He’s got so much left.”

Colon said this matter-of-factly, like it’s normal for a 43-year-old to summon the requisite energy it takes not just to play baseball but do so at an elite level. It takes a little squinting to reconcile their histories and their performances today, but if Ortiz and Colon have proven one thing, it’s that people are perfectly happy not to know. They rather wouldn’t.

Ortiz and Colon aren’t a referendum on baseball and its drug policy; they’re just a couple of guys who highlight the disconnect between the demonization of PEDs from so many inside the baseball world and the laissez-faire attitude of so many outside. Ortiz was the spokesman for the Red Sox – for the entire city of Boston, really – after the marathon bombings. His defiance and passion that day meant more than any drug ever can.

It’s why, as he approaches retirement, Ortiz can be in Boston or Santo Domingo and still be a hero. And why, with retirement perhaps planned after the 2017 season, Colon can take his victory lap, too, and return to the Dominican Republic with Ortiz. This All-Star Game stuff – this is just gravy, the reward for lasting this long.

And however they made it, David Ortiz and Bartolo Colon, two Dominican kids without a whole lot in common, are here together, the 11th pair of 40-something All-Stars, friends craving one final showdown. Maybe their managers will arrange it; this is, after all, an exhibition game. Should the suns not align, the baseball gods not approve, Ortiz and Colon’s presence here will have been plenty, perfectly, delightfully weird.