Missing the postseason can make a season unforgettable. If that were always true, fans of the Seattle Mariners would still be wondering where the time has gone during the last 20 years of their life.
A season under .500 may also constitute such a claim; however, so much would have been lost for the Colorado Rockies in 1994, 2006, 2008 and 2016 as the club was building towards the playoffs.
We may look back upon 2021 as the year Brendan Rodgers emerged and started displaying behaviors of the organization’s next superstar. The year may be about the lessons learned by Germán Márquez en route to throwing only the second no-hitter in franchise history or, perhaps even bolder, the lessons that elevated him to becoming a Cy Young Award winner.
The season could also be the jumping point for a starting rotation that is able to keep it together for the entirety of the year and carry the club into the postseason.
Until any of those things happen, 2021 will be remembered for one man: Larry Kenneth Robert Walker.
Signed in April of 1995 following an ugly work stoppage that saw the cancellation of the 1994 World Series, Walker was nothing less than the one of the best outfielders of his era during a time in which many of his peers chose performance enhancement in the form of drugs over that of a homer-friendly ballpark.
During his 10 seasons in Colorado, he performed at the top of nearly all offensive categories and was awarded with two Silver Slugger Awards. He was a skilled baserunner (126 stolen bases) and played exquisite defense in right field, earning five Gold Glove Awards.
His all-around abilities were rewarded in 1997 with the National League Most Valuable Player Award. Even by modern metrics, it’s clear that no player – pitcher or hitter – outperformed him in the league that year. To this day, it remains the only MVP in franchise history.
Coupled with six seasons at the start of his career with the Montréal Expos and a brief sojourn with the St. Louis Cardinals that took him to the 2004 World Series, Walker’s career was amongst the best of his generation.
Somehow, it wasn’t enough to earn him a spot in Cooperstown’s most coveted locker room, the Hall of Fame.
The debate about why Walker wasn’t worthy focused not on the man or his accomplishments, but on the ballpark in which he played the majority of his career: Coors Field. Even with the modern statistics to help quantify the benefits of such an environment, it didn’t seem to matter that Walker was still amongst the best.
As voters passed on Walker each year, it became a growing indictment on not just players in hitter-friendly stadiums or the confines of Coors Field, but also on the Colorado Rockies, the last of MLB’s 30 teams to not have any representation in the Hall.
So when the day came for the announcement in January 2020 that the youngest brother of Barry, Carey and Gary was going to Cooperstown, it was a day for Rockies fans to celebrate like never before. Sure, the ceremony took a year and two months longer than was initially expected, but it finally happened.
On September 8, 2021, the Colorado Rockies were in the Hall of Fame. In front of a field of baseball fans just a mile away from the steps of the building where the likes of Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Effa Manley and Hank Greenberg are enshrined, Larry Walker had the moment he’d been waiting for since stepping away from the game more than a decade earlier.
Even more special was the response from supporters of every team as they learned about his lifetime statistics, the unique beginnings of his professional career and the personality of the man that brought SpongeBob SquarePants into the same museum of artifacts as Ty Cobb’s infamous cleats.
Then, to be able to celebrate with him – and his beautifully designed plaque – during his number retirement ceremony on September 25 in the place where it all took place was simply the cherry on top of the whipped cream mountain.
It was the closure the entire fanbase and organization needed. It was simply the most unforgettable moment of 2021.
