Carrying those bags of coffee have definitely added to his strength but somehow hasn’t helped with his at bats.
You can gain strength in many ways. One of the easiest ways is to change up your diet and then, perhaps hit the gym. But young Bartolo Colon was conventional and even innovative. In this New York Times interview, Bartolo’s dad recalled his son’s upbringing and specifically mentioned that carrying crates of coffee has contributed to his son’s strength.
“From childhood, he was very strong,” his father, Miguel Valerio Colon, recalled. “He was capable of pulping up to 1,000 crates of coffee beans in a day.”
Sometimes, while transporting bags of beans for his father’s produce business, young Bartolo would park his pet donkey, Pancho, beside a sloping lot that served as a baseball field and play a few innings with other children, using balls made of cloth….
If the de-pulping machine built up his arms, then throwing rocks to knock fruit from trees developed his accuracy. “Throwing at coconuts and mangoes,” Colon said. “But the coconut was the most difficult.”
Colon is aging like fine wine. Those crates of coffee have paid off.