Baseball in Colorado nothing to joke about
After traveling 2,500 miles in three days, arriving at their hotel at 2:30 a.m., the Rockies should have collapsed from exhaustion. Instead, they created the most magical moment in franchise history and proved that baseball in Colorado ain’t no joke.
In a winorgohome situation, Colorado shocked the Chicago Cubs 21 in a lucky 13 innings. This wildcard playoff game began Tuesday. It probably could’ve, and for the sake of everyone’s blood pressure definitely should’ve, ended four different times, but didn’t until after the clock struck midnight on Chicago’s season, off the bat of a Colorado hero nobody would have ever guessed.
The winning single, bounced through the middle of the Cubs infield that scored Trevor Story in the top of the 13th inning, was delivered by backup catcher Tony Wolters. Are you kidding me? Wolters was batting .170.
“We didn’t give up,” Wolters said. This was the sweet agony of baseball in October, when love feels like a knot in the stomach. When prayers are uttered before every pitch and memories
that bond fathers and sons forever are forged by nervous sweat and bone-rattling cheers.
As the Rockies and Cubs battled deep into the night, desperately trying to keep the World Series dreams of two cities alive, I tried to narrow the focus and see it through the eyes of Fernando Arenado, the father who knows the swing of Colorado’s slugging third baseman better than anybody else on earth, and Dan Freeland, a baseball dad who estimates he threw more than 400,000 pitches while the future Rockies ace was learning the game as a kid in Denver.
Love feels like a knot in the stomach.
Remember where you were and who you fist-bumped in Rocktober 2007? Kyle Freeland sure does. He was a skinny 14year-old freshman at Thomas Jefferson High School. When Matt Holliday did a face plant onto home plate for the run that beat the San Diego Padres in the lucky 13th inning, Freeland knows exactly where he was: leaping off the sofa at home.
“It was a school night,” Freeland recalled. “I was watching on TV with my dad.”
Fast forward 11 years. Freeland stood on the mound in Wrigley Field, staring into the teeth of 40,151 denizens of the Friendly Confines and a Cubs batting order that includes Kris Bryant and Javier Baez.
The rest of baseball laughs at Colorado, and doesn’t even have the decency to put a hand over the mouth to cover disdain for the game at 5,280 feet above sea level. Cubs manager Joe Maddon is one of the most copacetic dudes in the sport, but prior to this wild-card game, he uttered a little prayer of thanks it wasn’t being played in the Rockies’ ballpark, which he insisted is on the moon.
“Did he say moon?” Rockies manager Bud Black asked. Yes, Maddon did. “Nice,” Black said.
The ballots for the Cy Young Award have been cast. But is it too late to demand a recount? With all due respect to New York Mets ace Jacob deGrom, who richly deserves the honor, he doesn’t pitch half his games at zero gravity. Freeland pitched nearly 100 innings in Coors Field, winning 10 games with an earned run average of 2.40, statistics that would do proud Bob Gibson in his prime.
Against the Cubs, with millions watching Freeland on television, he was good enough to make a kid dream of majorleague glory. He shut down the Chicago offense on four hits and shut up the crowd, reduced from a roar to the nervous murmur of the age-old baseball angst never far from Wrigleyville.
I’m going to buy me a bulldog. I’m going to name it K-Free. Kylerado stood taller than Longs Peak. He’s the ace the Rockies have been waiting more than a quarter-century to find.
When Black ambled to the mound and took the baseball from a weary Freeland with two outs in the seventh inning and a Chicago runner standing on first base, however, the noise in the ballpark immediately increased by a factor of 10. Colorado relief pitcher Adam Ottavino threw his first pitch to the backstop, then immediately got himself in a bases-loaded jam. Uh-oh.
Ottavino escaped the mess in the seventh with a strikeout, but the Cubs got to him in the very next frame, tying the score when a double by Baez drove home teammate Terrance Gore.
The Rockies scored their first run so long ago I had to google it. Charlie Blackmon led off the game with a walk, got stuck at third when a double by DJ LaMahieu got stuck in the outfield ivy and lumbered across the plate on a sacrifice fly by Nolan Arenado.
The drama, which began Tuesday and didn’t end until four minutes past midnight in a Windy City drenched in tears, went on so long that in extra innings, Baez hugged Arenado on the basepaths, not to avoid a double play, but to avoid falling down from exhaustion.
“An instant classic,” Maddon said.
The excruciating knot in the stomach? Get used to it. The Rockies are off to Milwaukee, to face the Brewers in a National League division series.
And the love of baseball forged on this unforgettable four hours and 55 minutes of baseball in October?
That’s forever.