The Twins Must Apply the Bartolo Colon Lesson With Dallas Keuchel

The year is 2017. Droves of young folks are flocking to the streets with Despacito stuck in their heads, and an eerie sense that the state of the world is in some deep covfefe.

The Minnesota Twins are making a playoff push after finishing with the worst record in 2016. They’re led by an exciting offensive core and an underdog mentality. And the ageless Bartolo Colón, who signed with the club mid-season, has become the glue that seems to be holding everything together. Colón has held the back end of the rotation together through the thick haze of the summer.

Flash forward to the present day, and the story of the Twins isn’t the same as it was six years ago, but there are parts that definitely seem to rhyme. The club is still in pole position to claim a spot in the postseason, they have a savvy veteran making non-meaningless starts in late-August, and Despacito is still stuck in my head.

Dallas Keuchel is that veteran rotation reinforcement this year. He has made his way back to the MLB stratosphere after going through a dreadful two-year stretch from 2021 to 2022. The results have been rather mixed, but so were Colón’s in 2017. The point is that Keuchel and Colón serve the same purpose to their hopeful teams. They can hold the rotation together while some of the younger guys get themselves right before the playoffs.

That’s the goal for Keuchel as he squeezes out whatever toothpaste is left in the tube. And he might be just what the rotation needs if he can hold it together for a few more weeks.

The Twins tasked Bartolo with the same assignment in 2017, and things went surprisingly well for his first 10 starts in a Twins uniform. The former Cy Young winner had a respectable 3.94 ERA in that span, despite low strikeout totals (5.5 K/9) and a fastball that was on its last legs. But the veteran ate all the innings that he could, averaging just over six frames per start.

From September 10th through the end of that year, though, Colón’s performance fell off dramatically. He had a brutal 9.33 ERA in his final eight starts, and the risk of signing him started to catch up to the reward that it had reaped in July and August.

In a way, this year’s Twins team is tasked with trying to identify that tipping point before Keuchel’s contributions to the club falls to a similar fate. If he can provide a 10-start stretch like Colón’s first few weeks, where he provides quality starts and eats innings, then Minnesoeta will gladly take it.

That doesn’t mean he has to flirt with making history as he did on Sunday afternoon, when he took a perfect game into the seventh inning. But at the very least, he can use that same blueprint as he hopes to keep his role in a crowded rotation going forward.
“As long as I’m around the zone and making sure I’m mixing pitches and tunneling stuff correctly, like today, I can be as good as anyone out there,” Keuchel said. “This is why I came back. This was a good feeling.”

That’s a welcome feeling for the player and the team alike. And after Keuchel gave up the double that ended his bid for a perfecto and/or no-hitter, the team recognized that it might be for the greater good to pull him before things could get ugly. “I was kind of all over the place with the two-seam, and just was fortunate to kind of get one out [in the seventh],” Keuchel said. “I knew I was kind of running on fumes at that point. So it wasn’t a relief, but at the same time, when I came out, I knew I gave everything I had.”

For what it’s worth, Colón had a historic performance of his own for the Twins in 2017. No, it wasn’t a perfect game alert, or a shutout — or even an official quality start for that matter. But Big Sexy tossed a complete game on August 4th of that year against the same Texas Rangers that the club is facing this weekend. He allowed four earned runs, but he soaked up the workload for a beleaguered pitching staff as they rushed down the home stretch of the season.

Time will tell if Keuchel can recapture some of the magic that Colón provided for his first couple months with the Twins. And the good news is he hopefully won’t be counted on for a major role for much longer. Joe Ryan is nearing a return in the near-future, and Louie Varland continues to show plus stuff at Triple-A St. Paul.

So if these two tales of savvy veterans continue to rhyme, the club should reap the benefits of the early reward, and cut it when the risk tips the scales.