Acid Reflux Rox bring high anxiety of a race

Hey, Rockies. Quit dragging our hearts around. The winning streak died at the warning track. Ever hear 27,862 hopeful gasps turn to a group groan in a single breath?

In front of a ballpark full of anxious eyes, Chris Iannetta’s two-out blast in the bottom of the ninth inning went back, back, back … only to sputter near the 380-foot sign on the track. Colorado lost 4-3 on Tuesday night to San Diego.

Welcome to Coors Field, home of mile-high anxiety. We’re hopelessly in love with a baseball team that messes with our hearts, makes our tummies ache and forces hair to stand up and boogie on the back of our necks.

Does Colorado know how to play anything except back-from-the-brink and edge-of-your-seat baseball? The Rockies can’t possibly go on this way, all the way to the postseason? Can they?

Beats me. Some mysteries of nature are beyond man’s comprehension: Stonehenge, crop circles, the popularity of Adam Sandler movies.

Add the Rockies to the list. They are the most inexplicable sports phenomena in Denver since Tim Tebow. Heaven help us.

That Colorado is in the thick of the National League playoff race defies statistical explanation. Although this might be as good a place as any to start: Their record in one-run games, despite this loss to the Padres, is 21-13.

With this defeat, Colorado’s record is 68-57, despite being outscored by 13 runs throughout the season. If you’re a disciple of the gospel according to Bill James, this is nothing short of a baseball miracle.

No major-league team has qualified for the playoffs with a negative run margin since 2007, when the Arizona Diamondbacks won the National League West despite scoring 20 fewer runs than their opponents during the course of a 162-game schedule.

Remember 2007, don’t you? Rocktober. Twenty-one victories in 22 games. Matt Holliday still hasn’t touched home plate. But Colorado went to the World Series. There was a whole lot of wackiness in the baseball that year.

If there’s anything we know for certain about this year’s team, it’s the Rockies have this nasty habit of building themselves a mountain of trouble. Their earned run average in the first inning is 7.70, the second-highest by any major-league team since 1974.

And this was another fine mess the Rockies got themselves in, when starting pitcher Tyler “Kiss Me Goobye” Anderson served up a two-run gopher ball to San Diego’s Eric Hosmer before nearly 28,000 spectators in LoDo had a chance to dry their chairs from the afternoon rain and get comfortable in their seats.

Then the Rockies did what they always do. Grabbed a shovel and took turns digging themselves out of that 2-0 hole.

What’s crazy is how Colorado goes about mounting a comeback. This is not a team built for Coors Field. They don’t win games 9-8. If you’re waiting for these Rockies to buy you cheap tacos, you’re going to bed hungry.

Iannetta tied the score at 3-3 in the fifth inning with a 436-foot homer less than five minutes after he took a nasty foul tip off his right wrist behind the plate. Go figure.

But, in the eighth inning, trailing by a run, Colorado left the bases loaded when Trevor Story whiffed and Carlos Gonzalez grounded out to second base.

Here in Colorado, we’re experts at debating the Broncos’ depth chart. But dealing with the nightly anxiety of a playoff race? Not so much.

They’re the Acid Reflux Rox. The Give-Me-Rewrite Rox. The … oh, never mind. This team has my head spinning too fast to think straight.

“There’s nothing better than August and September baseball when your team is in a pennant race,” Rockies manager Bud Black said.

“And like I’ve said all along, this thing is going to go right down to the end … This is going to go down to the very last week.”

Get used to the late-inning indigestion and the mile-high melodrama. This team is hazardous to the health of your fingernails but spine-tingling fun.

Rockies baseball hurts so good.