On Being a Colorado Baseball Fan

By Jenny Shank, 10-01-07

It’s October first, and the Rockies are still alive.  Typing those words is thrilling.  It’s been a long fourteen years since Colorado first received its baseball franchise.  There have been a few bright spots: The short-lived stint in the playoffs as the Wild Card entrant in 1995, the era of the Blake Street Bombers where fans at least had regular homerun derbies to look forward to. 

And for a long time, the Rockies enjoyed the affection of Golden Retriever-like fans, fans so happy to get a local baseball team at last that they wanted to try everything, even the Wrigley Field tradition of throwing back the opposing team’s homerun balls until stadium security quashed this practice, citing safety concerns.

Still, Rockies fans remained a little too giddy, too thankful to have been chosen to receive a team--to this day many still cheer a bloop pop-up, unable or unwilling to distinguish between a batted ball that’s going to make an easy out and one that’s going to leave the park.

But lately Rockies fans have been grumbling.  Colorado set all kinds of attendance records when the team debuted in the cavernous, reconfigured old Mile High Stadium, and continued its crowd success when the new stadium was built, revitalizing a whole section of Denver.  But gradually attendance has been slipping away.  The fans’ Golden-Retriever puppyhood had passed.  If the Rockies owners wanted the seats filled, they had to field a team that was fun to watch.

People complained about the current owners’ skinflint ways, building a team on the cheap out of who-are-those-guys? Whether it was through luck or skill or heart, those guys turned out to be the right ones at the right time, catching fire this September and giving Colorado fans a thrilling pennant race the likes of which we’ve never seen.

I grew up nuts for baseball with no obvious team to channel my ardor towards.  In this part of the country, kids aren’t born destined to root for a certain team the way they are on the East Coast.  If you grew up in Colorado before the Rockies came along, you just had to pick. 

My brother loved the Royals during that team’s golden era, when they had Brett and Bo and Saberhagen.  During my childhood, my family took a few drives to Kansas City to see some baseball.  Even though it took nine hours to get there, the Royals were one of the closest teams to home.  I eventually settled on the Braves as my team, and it made a decent choice, as I had a team to root for in the playoffs almost every year.

I remember the period when Colorado was auditioning for a team, trying to convince Major League Baseball that we had the right stuff to support a franchise.  That’s part of why the Rockies are from “Colorado” and not “Denver"--the group of potential owners wanted to emphasize the team’s regional appeal.  Eventually, we won them over and were granted a team.  Everyone in Colorado dropped their old baseball loyalties, which were fabricated anyway, to root, root, root for the home team.

I no longer keep a set of miniature plastic batting helmets arranged in the order of the pennant races on the top of my dresser as I did when I was a kid.  But if I did, today the Rockies helmet would be right near the front, and just picturing it warms my heart. 

When the Rockies meet the Padres at Coors Field today in a one-game tiebreaker, you can bet I’ll be crossing my fingers, holding my breath, and wearing my rally cap.  Our home team has a shot at the playoffs on this bright October day and it feels grand; it’s the feeling we were seeking when we begged for a baseball team of our own, and for one day at least, Coloradoans get to ride it.