If there's a magical run to Rocktober this year, it needs to start now
Somewhere around the 7th inning of last night’s game against the Rockies, I did the unthinkable. I tweeted my frustration before the game had actually ended. I spent the whole day avoiding Friday the 13th superstitions, being a non-superstitious kind of guy. But when it comes to baseball… who isn’t, at least just a little bit, superstitious? So I went ahead and tweeted the following, knowing that it would probably spur a comeback:
at rocks game… frustrating. this teams goose is cooked for 2010.
That’s right – I played reverse psychology with the baseball gods, and was rewarded with a barely-over-the-wall Tulowitzki shot to end an excruciating offensive drought and give the Rockies a lead which Huston Street would go on to hold and earn the save. Now, it wasn’t a total offensive drought, because the game was scattered with doubles. It was, however, the first time the Rockies showed any propensity for getting a runner into scoring position and then finishing the job, rather than leaving the runner standing hopelessly out on base.
As soon as the Tulo homerun cleared the wall, and the pandemonium in the stands started to die down, my phone buzzed with an alert that someone had replied to my little prediction of doom, asking if I wanted to take back my statement. I replied that I didn’t, because it raises the question: Is the Rockies goose cooked for 2010? In other words, is this season over, the wild-card and division deficits too much too handle even for this team, the undisputed king of late season comebacks in recent years?
It’s our nature in sports as fans, and as writers, to want to call the shot. To be like Babe Ruth, pointing out exactly what will happen, and then watch it come to fruition as we pat ourselves on the back as the greatest sporting sage of our times. And it’s always easiest to be negative, to predict the worst. We don’t want the Rockies to fail, but when we predict their doom and it finally happens, there’s a smug satisfaction in knowing that we saw it coming. That is not what is happening here, folks. I promise you – I want nothing more than to see the Rockies win. I was elated when Tulo turned my frustration into elation in the bottom of the 8th inning last night. The right field stands were buzzing with excitement even as Tulo came to the plate, and I was more than happy to join them, even with my doubts in tow.
What I’m concerned with is the stop and start nature of this team. There has yet to be a good long streak – in either direction, thankfully, but nothing that shows consistency. Having Tulo and Helton back puts the lineup in less of an amorphous state, but it just doesn’t feel like a team that has a run in them. I wish I could belabor you with statistics and empirical data to back up my claim, but all I have is a long-time baseball fan who has watched a ton of teams go through this same place: tons of talent, inability to translate into anything better than a “good, not great” team. I spent my formative baseball years watching the Mariners in the Kingdome – as I grew up in baseball, so did the M’s – Griffey Jr. in his prime, with guys like Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner, Randy Johnson, and a highly-touted rookie named Alex Rodriguez joined up later on. This Rockies team looks just like those Mariners clubs of the middle-90s: so talented that you go down the roster and find reasons to like every name on the list, but when you look at the standings, you see a mediocre to slightly above average team, that just can’t cross the divide and join the true elites of baseball.
I’m not going to write the in memoriam just yet, and the “what the team needs to do for next year” piece can wait until late fall – but I will say this. The Rockies are on life support. They are too far back in the division behind the enigmatic Padres who just don’t seem to show any signs of fading. They have too many good baseball teams fighting for the wild card ahead of them, and this habit of completely going to sleep offensively, especially on the road, just isn’t going to cut it. I don’t see a run materializing this time around, not for 2010. But there’s still time, and if Rockies fans know anything, it’s to not give up prematurely.
But if it prods the baseball gods into allowing such a run, I’ll go ahead and be more than willing to take one for the team and say it: This team’s goose is cooked for 2010. You hear that baseball gods? Cooked.
