For years, disgruntled fans of the Colorado Rockies have been calling for a boycott of Coors Field. They say that the only way ownership will make changes is if they get hit in the pocketbook.
The problem, however, is that summer nights, with the sun setting over the Rocky Mountains, in the dry, crisp air, provides such a beautiful setting that even someone who doesn’t like baseball would consider going to Coors Field to take in a great night in Colorado.
The reality is, with the setting that Coors Field provides, the Rockies are secondary. The team could lose 10-1 and thousands of paying customers couldn’t tell their co-workers the next day at work whether the Rockies won or lost. With those types of people pouring through the turnstyles, no boycott would ever work.
Even season ticket holders, who do care about the results, are hard-pressed to give up their tickets. When push comes to shove, after a long, cold winter, the idea of spending summer nights at Coors Field is too much of a cabin fever routine to give up their tickets.
If that was ever going to change, it is coming in the summer of 2015. It has been a year that has been hard to understand for even the best of meteorologists to understand. Games at Coors Field in July have been featuring jackets and long pants instead of shorts and flip flops. The rain has caused fans to have to sit through hours of long rain delays, and made waking up early the next day for work extremely difficult.
While the Rockies pulled off a 5-3 win as Thursday rolled into Friday, it is hard not to acknowledge that it was the second consecutive day in which the game started in one day and ended in the next.
When cabin fever sets in around December of 2015, and everyone is wishing the snow would go away, fans might not be thinking about the warm summer nights at Coors Field. The lasting memory might be shivering underneath an umbrella in mid-July. That, coupled with another sub-par Rockies team that has already started to play with the lackluster attitude that has been crippling over the past four years, might be what pushes fans that their investment in tickets might be better utilized elsewhere.
It was a nice change of pace to see the Rockies end up on the winning side of the ledger on Thursday. The bullpen, which had to pick up eight full innings after Kyle Kendrick had his start washed out after just one inning of work, was very good. David Hale picked up the ball, but could only go 1-1/3 innings before straining his groin on the base paths. Christian Friedrich and Scott Oberg picked up much of the slack, as well as Rafael Betancourt, who finally looked like himself again.
On the offensive side, Carlos Gonzalez smashed three doubles. He finally looks like he might be finding his groove again for the first time in what seems like forever. If CarGo can start to become the player that his talent suggests that he can still be, the Rockies second half might not be terrible.
For the Rockies, the ultimate goal for the second half of the season must be to build a foundation that the team can use moving into 2016. They have an option. They can either play out the string and feel bad for themselves for having yet another terrible season, or they can decide that they have the talent, as well as some minor league depth coming through the system, to be a better team than they have been. They can’t simply quit and hope that things will be better because the calendar changes years. The only way this team and franchise will get better is if they hold themselves to a higher standard and begin to believe that they can be better.
While the Rockies picked up a win on Thursday, the biggest win of the season for the club might come when it actually stops raining.
