CarGo is the player to be named later
Wearing a sly smile and a Rockies T-shirt, Carlos Gonzalez stood in precisely the same spot of the same clubhouse where I shook his hand and said goodbye six months ago.
“You keep trying to get rid of me,” said Gonzalez, laughing as he extended his right hand and put my palm in a vice grip that wouldn’t quit. “But I keep coming back.”
The poets wax poetic about the smell of freshly mowed grass, because opening day has a funny way of turning split-finger fastballs and sunflower seeds into Shakespeare. But, truth be known, baseball can be a brutal business.
And the biggest surprise on the lineup card Colorado manager
Bud Black filled out Thursday was Gonzalez. He played his ninth straight opening day for the Rockies only because CarGo refused to let the brutal business ruin a beautiful relationship with Denver.
“For me, this year is a great chance to bounce back and to redeem myself,” said Gonzalez, who is now 32 years old but believes there’s still thunder in his bat. “I’m not here to prove anything to anybody, because a lot of times we get caught up in that and we want to show everybody. We all play for ourselves and our teammates, not to prove somebody wrong.”
Opening day is all about new beginnings, but this one was about the humility required to accept a second chance. When Gonzalez was unable to find work anywhere else in the major leagues, he returned to the Rockies, agreeing to a one-year, $8 million contract with Colorado only three weeks ago. It was too late to be included in the team’s media guide, but from the first minute CarGo walked back in the clubhouse, he was greeted like a long-lost brother.
“It was like I never left,” Gonzalez said. “That’s a great thing — when you’re sitting at home, trying to get a job somewhere, and you have all your old teammates, hoping you come back.”
CarGo has represented Colorado in the All-Star Game three times and hit more than 200 home runs for the Rockies. But he’s the franchise’s all-time leader in smiles, not to mention the player most likely to spontaneously break into dance during batting practice.
While $8 million can only be considered a bargain through the reality-warping prism of professional sports, the good-faith investment general manager Jeff Bridich made in Gonzalez also comes with a degree of risk. Gonzalez started in right field and hit in the five hole for the Rockies against Arizona, but at the expense of sending David Dahl, one of the organization’s most prized prospects, to the minor leagues at season’s outset.
After 2017, when it required a late surge for Gonzalez to finish with an unimpressive .262 batting and a meager 14 homers, is the pressure on him to produce and prove he can still be CarGo?
“You look back, my very first year with the Rockies, I thought I was going to get sent down to the minors every day,” said Gonzalez, who made a nasty habit of chasing sliders in the dirt way back in 2009. “I would go 0-for-4, and I’d leave the clubhouse, thinking ‘OK, this is it. They won’t even let me go home. They’re sending me down after the game.’ But you keep showing up and learn that keeping your head up is the only way to bounce back from those tough moments and not let the game beat you. After all these years, that’s why I’m still here.”
The real beauty of opening day?
“I get to start from zero, start fresh,” Gonzalez said. “And I have the same motivation that every general manager, every manager and every player has on opening day, which is winning a championship.”