The late Paul Jacobs was Rockies’ first heavy hitter
There would be no fireworks at Coors Field on the Fourth of July without him.
He never hit a home run in LoDo. His name doesn’t elicit the same smiles as the Blake Street Bombers’ big blasts from the past. But trust me on this: The original baseball hero in Rockies history is Paul A. Jacobs, a Denver attorney who passed away Monday at age 78.
On July 5, 1991, National League president Bill White welcomed Colorado to the big leagues as an expansion team, beating out stiff competition from Buffalo to Phoenix.
“No Paul Jacobs, no Rockies at that time,” franchise founder and general partner Charlie Monfort told me.
Without Jacobs, who knows? Maybe there never would have been purple pinstripes or any Rocktober miracle to remember. And certainly not a 25th anniversary celebration this summer for the team that helped transform Denver from a dusty old cowtown into one of America’s most vibrant cities.
If that sounds like hyperbole, I humbly suggest you go back and review your Rockies history. The mother of this franchise was a dream. The father was a bluff. And Jacobs delivered the baby. Given all the complications at the time, you would’ve had to be Rocky Mountain High to believe he could pull it off. Come to think of it, that might be a decent working title for a “30 for 30” film on how Denver got baseball.
Colorado chased and wooed the major leagues for nearly a
generation. At the outset of the 1990s, when John Elway was the young prince of the city, Denver’s best sales pitch was to put the Rockies in Mile High Stadium, which was far better suited for playing football at altitude.
“Paul was relentless getting the Rockies and baseball here,” Monfort said. “And he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
Here’s the little anecdote I like best about the ingenuity displayed by Jacobs during the courtship. Afraid NL representatives might think 315 feet down the leftfield line could make a joke of baseball at a mile above sea level, he ordered new white paint to fib the distance as 330 feet during an inspection a few scant months before the expansion decision was to be made.
But there was one slight problem with Jacobs’ cunning plan to give the inspectors a little sleight of a painter’s hand. White had played in Denver as a minorleaguer. And Jacobs was ohsobusted.
The expansion fee in 1991 was $95 million. It seems an impossibly good bargain by today’s crazybillions franchise valuations. But, back in the day, Colorado had trouble finding anyone to put up the dough.
The Rockies went through two ownership groups before the first pitch was thrown in 1993, and those monetary travails are welldocumented. From the start, whether turning over every rock in a nationwide hunt for original investors or recruiting Colorado businessmen Jerry McMorris and Monfort to keep a faltering deal alive, it was Jacobs who was the fixer.
“I stepped up because I trusted Paul Jacobs,” Monfort said.
At the ballpark, the timehonored tradition to honor the dearly departed is a moment of silence. Jacobs, a Massachusetts native raised a Red Sox fan and relocated to Denver as a teenager in the Air Force, never sought much credit for making the Rockies a reality. His stance as a spectator at home games in Lodo was distinctive, in his own quiet way. Jacobs would sit, often with a baseball cap low on his forehead. Arms folded across his chest. Strong. Stoic. But always watching passionately, missing no detail.
Although he would never advocate it, can I be so bold as to suggest the best way to thank Jacobs is with a raucous standing ovation from the big, happy crowd on the Fourth of July at the Coors Field?
Let every firework that explodes over the ballpark be a warm salute to the franchise’s original heavy hitter.