“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
— A.A. Milne

The day I stopped singing with my best friends as a full-time gig is one I cannot forget, but might rather not recall. We were in our last rehearsal for our last show, a rehearsal we really didn’t need, as we’d done each of the songs we’d be performing hundreds, if not thousands, of times. It’s a good thing we didn’t need to be rehearsing, as I was full-on inconsolable. It was the dream of a lifetime I’d dedicated a full decade to, and the reality that it wouldn’t turn out to be my “forever” gig had fully come to roost. As we sat there and tried to sing, I blew through at least one full box of tissues all by myself. Maybe more. It was a tough moment to swallow. I was entirely convinced I’d never be singing with those four folks again, and found I had no control over how that was hitting me.

Conversely, I’m not entirely convinced Kyle Freeland has thrown his last pitch for the Colorado Rockies. Apparently, neither is Kyle Freeland.

But someone probably should have told his tear ducts. He was in full-box-of-tissues mode on Tuesday night. 

Freeland walked into Coors Field on Tuesday knowing all of the possibilities. His five-year contract is ending. The $17 million player option for next season required him to pitch 170 innings this year, a number injuries made unreachable some time ago. For the first time in his purple-pinstriped professional career, Kyle Freeland is about to become a free agent. 

And apparently all of that abstraction became something much more tangible when he pulled into the players’ parking lot Tuesday afternoon.

“I didn’t know when it was going to hit me,” Freeland said afterward. It hit him right there in the parking lot, with the realization that he might be walking into Coors Field to make a start for the final time. So he tried to notice everything. The people in the hallways. The walk to the field. The ballpark itself. The place where he has spent his entire major-league life. Then he went out and got shelled.

Baseball can be a real a-hole that way.

Nine hits. Five earned runs. Three innings, plus one batter. Sadly, a bit of a microcosm of his season this year. When manager Warren Schaeffer finally came to get him after a leadoff single in the fourth, Freeland walked toward the dugout to an ovation, waved toward the stands, hugged his teammates and cried. 

It also just so happened to be the Rockies’ 100th loss of the season. Again. If that was the ending for him, it was not the ending anyone would have written… which, weirdly, may make it a pretty fitting ending to Kyle Freeland’s Rockies career, because nothing about pitching for this franchise is easy.

Freeland grew up in Denver, went to Thomas Jefferson High School, and was taken eighth overall by his hometown team in the 2014 draft. He made his major-league debut at Coors Field in 2017 and won. A year later, he put together one of the finest pitching seasons in Rockies history: 17-7, a 2.85 ERA, fourth in Cy Young voting, and an almost preposterous 2.40 ERA at Coors Field.

And when Colorado needed him most that postseason, he took the ball on three days’ rest at Wrigley Field and threw 6⅔ scoreless innings in the Wild Card game. That heroic turn in that game remains the Rockies’ last postseason victory. Eight. Years. Ago.

Oof.

A lot has happened since, almost none of it as much fun. Freeland never quite reached those heights again, and neither did the Rockies. His ERA has topped 5.00 in three of the last four seasons and sits above 6.50 this year. As mentioned, Tuesday’s loss was also Colorado’s 100th of the season, making the Rockies the first team since the expansion Mets of 1962-65 to lose 100 games four consecutive years.

Double oof.

Which is why the question of whether Freeland should return next season is more complicated than whether Rockies fans love him. They do. I do.

The reality of it all is this… Paul DePodesta and Josh Byrnes have been tasked with building whatever comes next, not preserving whatever came before. Freeland will be 34 next season. The Rockies desperately need better pitching, and sentimentality is a lousy way to construct a rotation.

Still… There ought to be some room in baseball for a player to mean more than the last number on the back of his baseball card.

Freeland has now started 256 games for Colorado, 50 more than anyone else in franchise history. He owns the franchise records for starts and innings pitched, has the best pitching WAR in Rockies history, is second in strikeouts and third in wins. Every single one of those pitches came wearing the same uniform, for the team that plays a few miles from where he grew up. That’s increasingly rare in sports.

It’s a collection of numbers no Rockies pitcher had ever put together. Until Kyle.

Freeland recently said it “would be nice to spend a whole career in Colorado,” while acknowledging that baseball doesn’t always work that way. And maybe it still shouldn’t this time. Maybe another team gives him a chance to discover what pitching half his games somewhere other than altitude feels like. Maybe Colorado decides those innings are better spent finding the next Kyle Freeland rather than hanging onto this one.

Or maybe there’s still a deal that makes sense for both sides, at a very different number than $17 million, and Tuesday turns out to have been an emotional false alarm. I, for one, kind of hope so.

Not because Kyle Freeland is still the pitcher who shut down Wrigley Field in 2018. He isn’t. And this new Rockies leadership group cannot afford to confuse honoring the past with building the future. That habit has bitten the franchise far too many times in the past. 

But if Tuesday really was goodbye, I hope Rockies fans remember the whole thing rather than the ugly final line. The hometown kid made good. The 2.40 Coors ERA. Wrigley. Ten seasons. 256 starts. Nearly 1,400 innings thrown in the most hostile pitching environment baseball has ever devised, at least until the Mars expansion takes place.

And finally, a grown man sitting in the dugout crying because wearing Colorado across his chest meant that damned much to him. So, I sat and cried along with him. It sure meant a lot to me, too.

If that was goodbye, it was a lousy start, and I need to go buy some more kleenex (™). Whether it was or wasn’t, it was also one hell of a career.