Skip to main content

Rockies fall in four

The story that will be told the most tonight is that of the Boston Red Sox, who just swept their second World Series in four years.

It's a good story, if you're a complete freaking moron who believes it's weird for a team not to win championships very often, as Red Sox fans once believed.

I'd rather talk about the Colorado Rockies, whose season ended on somewhat-low-but-honestly-quite-high note tonight. It's unfortunate that Colorado's miracle run through the postseason came to such a sudden stop in the World Series, and I suppose it's too bad they couldn't win at least one game in Coors Field. But I'm still amazed I was watching a World Series game at Coors in the first place.

I don't mean to make the team sound like lovable losers, or that I'm pleased with the Series outcome. I'm not. Missed chances might hurt the most in baseball, because getting to the championship round requires healthy doses of skill and luck. A basketball team can almost always make it back deep in the playoffs, or nearly back, the next year. Many football teams do, too. But baseball relishes tormenting the teams who came oh-so-close.

All of that said, the Rockies' playoff run was easily the most incredible thing that has happened since I started this blog. The only competition came when the Broncos beat the Patriots and, in a flash, hosted the AFC Championship game the next week. Like all Broncos fans, I love the AFC Championship. The Broncos were one game away from making the Super Bowl and setting off two weeks of Orange Crush mania. (Frankly, it would have put even the celebration of a Rockies World Series win to shame.) The Rockies, though, made it a round further than the Broncos, and with a team fewer expected to get there.

So while my heart aches, most of all for Todd Helton, I'm so glad he and the team at least got a shot. This Rockies team may still be young enough to have a bright future, but I'm just grateful that we've had such a wonderful present.

Comments

John said…
Well said. The Rockies had one of the great - and historic - runs this year, and we should celebrate the fact that they came back from 4th place on September 15th to play in the World Series. I would have liked to have a seen a different result or at least a better showing, but with our youn nucleus we should be competitive for a number of years. I hope Helton sticks around for another couple of seasons.
9:26 AM
John said…
And I frankly blame Fox Sports - if we hadn't been forced into a 47-day layoff so Fox could maximize its ad revenues, we might still have been hot by the time the Series rolled around.
11:38 AM
blaine said…
I agree with you John. While I was watching the world series games I couldn't believe none of the Rockies (Hawpe in particular) could catch up to a fastball. I've been watching the Rockies all year and they have been awesome at hitting the fastball. They couldn't catch up against the Sox. Why? Because their timing was thrown off by not playing for 8 days. Granted, the Sox have some great pitching, but all they were really doing was throwing fastball after fastball.
1:49 PM
Mike said…
Yeah. I think it's clear that the Red Sox were better this year...but the Series could have been so much more entertaining if it weren't for the 47-day layoff. I did like the dramatic World Series music, though.
2:22 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And now that it’s gone, it’s like it wasn’t there at all

I never thought this blog would last longer than Jay Cutler's career with the Denver Broncos. He was a talented young prospect so good that the Broncos, a powerhouse organization only one game removed from the Super Bowl the season before, traded up to get him—or, in other words, a player whose upside was so huge, the team sacrificed its present to get his future. And now? He's gone . How did it come to this? * * * Often I'll play devil's advocate with a move like this; you know, I'll try and explain how it makes sense from the other side of the table. Today, during the most disastrous Broncos offseason in memory—and the draft hasn't even happened yet, so settle in—I just don't have it in me. I don't think move is really defensible from a football standpoint. But what the heck: as the article above says, the Broncos are sending Cutler and a fifth-round draft pick this month to the Chicago Bears for quarterback Kyle Orton, Chicago's first-rounder in t...
11 comments
Read more

Who cares?

So we finally got done with the NBA playoffs after nearly two months of stretched-out play, and tomorrow's the draft. I really couldn't care less. I'm so burned out on the sport. Sadly, there's nothing else going on worth mentioning, so we might as well get into it. (Yes, baseball, Pugs, but I haven't really started following that this year yet, sorry.) Would the NFL hold its draft five days after the Super Bowl? Of course not, and not just because the league doesn't want to distract from the highlight of its annual calendar, the Pro Bowl. Of course, the NBA's situation is a little different. College play ended two and a half months ago, and the teams want to get draftees ready for the all-important summer league play (because the kind of guys that need the summer league always end up players). Not that when college basketball is over is relevant, anyway-the league is overrun by a bunch of high school players "just months removed from their prom" (...
12 comments
Read more

Did CU ever win the Pac-12?

In 2010, I bet a college buddy of mine (who longtime readers may remember as the only other contributor to Hole Punch Sports) that CU’s football team would not win the Pac-12 in the next 15 years. Guess what? It’s time for me to gloat, because I was right. Why we were doomed Back in the day, a lot of people made the argument that CU should join the Pac-12 because we’d get so much more TV money there. Of course, given college football is the answer to the question, “what if you had a sport where multiple teams were like the Yankees, and you created a whole universe of haves and have-nots?”, then yeah, you want to be aligned with some of the haves. But the question in my mind wasn’t, “will CU be better off with more money?” That’s an obvious yes. The question I asked was, will CU be any more competitive in their own conference if they’re competing against teams who are also getting more money? I couldn’t see why they would be. The mathematical angle Legend has it that Cowboys runn...
2 comments
Read more