Charlie Brown and the football = Charlie B and the baseball? An inauspicious start for Rockies baseball

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over.”
– Apparently not Albert Einstein

I’ve missed baseball. Growing up with baseball gave it a special place in my heart, and even with the frustrations the Colorado Rockies have wrought – at least for this member of their fanbase – over the last several seasons, the Rockies still have a litany of compelling players and stories to follow and engage fans for yet another year.

As Spring sprung, it felt easy to get excited about this season’s opportunities and how Colorado might grow with another year under their belts for this youth movement. Opening Day meant setting aside time to watch with friends and see how the team would fare against last year’s NL Champs, the Arizona Diamondbacks. There isn’t a tougher division in baseball than Colorado’s NL West, and the Rox certainly faced a potent team to start their 2024 campaign. Sometimes getting your hopes up can make you feel like a real blockhead.

Giving up two runs in the first inning was a little disheartening, but you could see how geeked the D-Backs were to open in front of their home crowd. It seemed like the Rockies took a moment to settle themselves, and came back in the top of the second to pick one up themselves. After trading a scoreless bottom of the second with a scoreless top of the third, things got… well, things got both tough and weirdly familiar for a moment.

For what only felt like forever, Arizona simply went ballistic, throwing up 14 runs in the bottom of the 3rd. It’s hard to describe the experience if you didn’t watch it, but here’s a few stats that might put it into perspective…

• Arizona batted around twice in the inning. For those of you who aren’t baseball fans, that’s 18 batters to the plate.
• Five of their batters got two hits each. In the same inning. 10 of their 13 hits in the frame.
• A rookie got his first big-league single, bringing around that 14th run.
• The Diamondbacks only got two walks and no homers in the inning.
• The inning unsurprisingly set several Arizona club records.
• It was the highest scoring inning on an Opening Day in 124 years.

Yow. That forever only actually took 34 minutes, but it was all we could do after that to keep the group together to watch the rest of the game. To their credit, the Rockies hunkered down and didn’t let the Diamondbacks have another run the rest of the game. Sadly, they wouldn’t muster another run against them, either. While there were positives to be taken out of the last five scoreless innings, they were buried under the avalanche of allowing as many batters in one inning as you hope to see in six. Final, Rockies 1, Diamondbacks 16. We will not be 162-0 yet again this season.

I’m ready to love baseball again. I’m ready to watch more baseball again. But if there are too many meltdowns of this scale over the next 161 games… I’ll still be missing the game, even if I sit down and power through every one. Am I just Charlie Brown watching Charlie Blackmon? What a blockhead.