Don't jump to conclusions on Colon

Toward the end of spring training, down in Tampa, you saw the shock and awe on the faces of delighted Yankees officials whenever you initiated this topic of conversation:

What in the world was going on with Bartolo Colon? Where was he getting this velocity? This command? How had he emerged looking so brilliant after being a baseball non-entity for five years?

Fast-forward six weeks to Friday night at Yankee Stadium, and Colon has delivered even more delighted shock to the Yankees. He has drawn questions from the rest of baseball.

Despite taking the loss in the Yankees' 5-4 defeat, the soon-to-be 38-year-old pitched a strong game against the Red Sox, allowing three runs (two earned) in six-plus innings. Colon did so, however, under the cloud of a Major League Baseball investigation concerning a procedure he underwent in April 2010.

I'd bet a month of Colon's Yankees salary (one-sixth of $900,000 is $150,000, for those keeping score at home) that the probe leads absolutely nowhere. That doesn't matter, though. We know from experience that the finger-pointing moralists need merely the whiff of wrongdoing to start casting doubt.

As former Red Sox infielder Lou Merloni, now an analyst for WEEI Radio in Boston, wrote on Twitter, "Bart is 38 later this month. It's about the age that most regain their velo . . . circa 1999."

1999, as you know, was about the peak of what we now affectionately call "The Steroid Era."

Colon has a 3.74 ERA in eight games (five starts). He has pitched like someone who could handle a postseason start in the rough-and-tumble American League playoffs.

The Red Sox employed Colon in 2008 and got only seven starts and 39 innings out of him before he went down with back problems.

"This is what we were hoping to see," Boston manager Terry Francona said before Friday's game. " . . . We've seen him pitch well, and now it seems like he's getting a little resurgence."

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Colon, who didn't pitch professionally last year, underwent a surgery in which Dr. Joseph R. Purita took his fat and bone marrow stem cells and injected them into his shoulder and elbow.

Purita says he has used human growth hormone, on MLB's banned list, as part of such treatments, but he didn't in Colon's case.

Colon's comeback defies belief, so folks want to point to this procedure and, specifically, the possible HGH usage. I get it. We all got burned by the likes of Mark McGwire and Alex Rodriguez, and our first reaction now is suspicion and skepticism.

That's fine. However, can we at least be skeptical with a dose of intelligence? You need only cursory medical knowledge to understand that HGH, by itself, cannot be responsible for Colon's remarkable rise from the baseball dead. HGH simply doesn't pack that sort of a wallop.

It's far more feasible that Purita simply is ahead of the curve and discovered a legal avenue to remaking Colon. Shoot, maybe Purita and Colon found something that might be declared illegal someday. That isn't Colon's problem, though.

The very definition of "cheating" is murky when you consider all of the players who used amphetamines back in the 1960s. Good for baseball that it now employs the most strenuous testing of any major professional sport. Yet can we contend with any level of certainty that the game is truly "clean"?

Enjoy Colon's rebirth if you're a baseball fan. Don't sweat the prospect of discipline if you're a Yankees fan. Don't assume guilt if you're a Yankees hater.

It's a complicated world. But the boxscore is infallible, and Colon looks pretty good there.