Humidor Jr. makes debut at Chase Field in opener
PHOENIX» In the dog days of the baseball season, Chase Field has all the charm of a big-box Costco or a shipping warehouse, but the Rockies will find a little piece of home waiting for them to open the season here Thursday night.
The Diamondbacks will debut their humidor against the Rockies, just the second use of a climate-controlled space to store baseballs, mimicking the one Coors Field started using in 2002. Arizona, as the Rockies do, will store baseballs in the humidor before carting them to the umpires’ room just before game time.
“I’m pro-humidor. Let’s keep the moisture in,” Colorado manager Bud Black said, drumming up some fake enthusiasm. “Hey, it’s great for cigars. How can it be bad for baseball? They go hand in hand. Just ask Red Auerbach. Great baseball man, Red. Him and Eddie Stanky.”
Black joked, but the Diamondbacks put a lot of thought into the idea, just as the Rockies did 16 years ago. Coors Field once ranked first, by far, in home runs and runs scored. But after the humidor was introduced, home runs dropped from 268 in 2001 to 185 in 2007 (10th most in baseball) and runs dipped from 13.4 per game in 2001 to 10.6 in 2007.
Coors Field’s idea for the humidor came from a team engineer named Tony Cowell, who experimented by dropping moisturized baseballs from the stadium’s roof to see how high they bounced. The Diamondbacks, though, worked off evidence from Coors Field and their own research. They settled on an exact range of 50 percent humidity, relative to Arizona’s desert air, and 70 degrees.
“I never had a problem. I just know it’s a ballpark (where the ball) flies,” Rockies pitcher Jon Gray said. “It’s just part of the game. You just try not to give up hard-hit balls. If it makes an improvement, good. But both teams have to deal with it, so it evens out, regardless.”
Gray’s goal.
have a The Rockies specific plan for Gray this season, one that he wholeheartedly agrees with. He wants to pitch at least 33 games and more than 200 innings.
The last time the Rockies had a pitcher throw that many starts or innings was in 2010, when Ubaldo Jimenez threw 221M innings over 33 games.
“I want to be a guy who is there the whole time,” said Gray, who missed more than two months last season with a broken foot suffered fielding a grounder in San Francisco on April 13. “I want to stay healthy and be a workhorse.”
Footnotes.
Lefty Kyle Freeland pitched a simulated game Thursday on a back field at Salt River Fields, setting him up for a start Tuesday at San Diego. Right-hander Chad Bettis will start Monday to open a four-game series against the Padres… If the rotation holds, right-hander German Marquez will start the Rockies’ home opener April 6.