The Blake Street Bombers: Products of their talent or of their environment?

We’ve all fallen into the trap at some point.

The Colorado Rockies sign or make a trade for a significant bat – a rare thing but something that the facts nonetheless state does happen – and we all start dreaming specifically on how that player will look at Coors Field.

It doesn’t matter where they are coming from. This new player is moving to a more offensively friendly environment. Naturally, their raw numbers should simply get better, right?

We boost what those numbers will look like in our minds and end up projecting a player like Daniel Murphy to break Earl Webb’s MLB record of 67 doubles.

Less adventurous prognostications might simply reach the seemingly logical conclusion that the batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging of any player coming to Coors should increase by at least a few points, at the very least.

But there is sparse evidence of this ever actually happening.

So why do we continue to believe after 28 years of baseball in our backyard that it’s definitely going to happen next time?

Now, wait a minute. You might be thinking of a relatively long list of players over the years who either were at their absolute best in Denver and maybe even won batting titles that they otherwise would not have. But what do the numbers say?

Before we dive into the data, perhaps we need a more exact definition of what it means to be a product of the field.

When we reached out to the Rockies fanbase on Twitter, asking who they thought had most benefited by the ballpark over the franchise’s history, it became clear that some use especially extreme splits as their barometer.

I must admit, I’ve never interpreted the concept this way.

Most players hit better at home than they do out on the road for a myriad of reasons. In fact, across all sports, athletes tend to perform better when sleeping at night in their own beds.

Then there is the now-proven element of the Margin of Air (or Hangover Effect) whereby every player to ever don purple has been at a disadvantage on the road.

So while it might be interesting to go through each hitter in Colorado history and see who had the biggest home/road splits, that would only tell us who benefited from Coors in such a way that it was also nullified by how poorly they hit on the road.

The biggest victims of this wonky dynamic are not truly getting a boost by the ballpark if their overall production for the season remains the same or less than it would elsewhere.

It is a near universal truth that players will have more extreme-splits as members of the Rockies than they will for any other team. Our goal with this exercise, then, is to try to determine to the best of our ability which players would have been just as good in any environment and which seemed better than they truly were because of where their home games took place.

As such we will be focusing on numbers during their tenure in Colorado and comparing them to their time elsewhere rather than examining splits.

Let’s begin this part of our ongoing research into the Coors Field Conundrum by taking a look at the cases in which this assumed dynamic appears actually be true. To put it another way, let’s dive into the best examples of a Coors Field Creation, starting at the beginning.

The Blake Street Bombers

A group of players with an excellent nickname shared the propensity for providing dramatic power displays in the early days of baseball in Denver. They also all shared the unique feature of having been acquired by the Rockies right in the middle of their primes, at least for a player during the 1990s.

These players provide us some nice data because each of them played significant seasons outside of Colorado, giving some indication what the back of their baseball card might have looked like without the aid of altitude and the massive outfield area at 20th and Blake.

There’s no denying that Larry Walker’s raw numbers match up pretty well with the narrative about this place. His best years were here, but he still has phenomenal seasons on his resume in Montreal and after leaving for St. Louis.

His literal case for the Hall of Fame pretty clearly shows that Walker would have been a stellar player anywhere. Set him aside as an outlier for now.

Ellis Burks carries a similarly flimsy case that is mired by an injury-riddled career. His single best season (1996) by raw numbers did come in Colorado but so did his second worst season the year before (1995).

Stints in Boston and San Francisco saw him put up basically the exact same numbers as he did in Denver.

With the Giants, at age 35, Burks matched his career high in batting average by hitting .344, further suggesting that he was just a great hitter when healthy despite his location. Hard to make the case his bat was more impacted by his ballpark than his general health.

In five-and-a-half seasons in Colorado, Burks posted a .938 OPS. In the four years immediately following, in the relative pitcher’s havens of Candlestick Park and Jacobs Field, he still posted a .930 OPS from age 34-38.

So, Burks and Walker were both just great regardless of environment. Neither was a product of Coors Field.

On the other hand…

A quick look at what happened to Andrés Galarraga when he came to Colorado may give us a huge hint at where this narrative that otherwise decent hitters could become near god-level in Denver originally arose.

After four very good seasons in Montréal to begin his career, Galarraga posted three consecutive sub-standard campaigns. His best of the three was 1990 when he hit .256/.306/.409 (.761 OPS) with 20 home runs. He also led the league in strikeouts for the third year in a row.

In 1991, he hit just .218 and in ’92 only .243, posting a .604 and .673 OPS, both career-lows.

Then original Rockies’ GM Bob Gebhard punched his ticket for Colorado.

In 1993, Galarraga batted .370/.403/.602 with 22 home runs at Mile High Stadium. He became the first in a long line of Rockies to lead the league in batting average and also established a career-high 1.005 OPS.

He was never quite that dominant again, but remained an offensive force for Colorado, hitting over .300 on three more occasions, never dipping below a .511 slugging percentage. At the time, it’s easy to see how anyone could reach the conclusion that, at 30-years-old, Galarraga went from a decent hitter to an elite one because of his environment.

But wouldn’t that suggest that as soon as he left said environment, especially at an older age, his numbers would greatly suffer? Because, like Walker and Burks, they didn’t.

Galarraga continued to rake his first two years in Atlanta at ages 37 and 39, missing an entire year because of chemotherapy treatment for non-Hodgkins Lymphona. The Big Cat hit over .300 and slugged over .520 both years. He mashed 44 home runs, the second most of his career, his first year away from Colorado.

And somehow, at age 42, in 110 games for the San Francisco Giants, Galarraga posted a slashline of .301/.352/.489,  good enough for an .841 OPS.

When looking at his entire career, the three years before he became a Rockie and a one-year batting average boom his first year in Denver are clear outliers.

The rest of his time in Colorado is right in line with his career numbers. Something clearly clicked with Galarraga later in his career, but it wasn’t the ballparks of Colorado.

The Best Cases

That brings us to the two most convincing cases that suggest Coors Field boosted the Bombers: Dante Bichette and Vinny Castilla.

Bichette’s career is a nearly perfect bell curve. He struggled his first two years with the Angels before jumping up to an OPS of .725 his third year. It dropped back down to .665 the following year before going back up to .724 his fifth year in the league at 28 years old.

Then he reunited with his hitting coach with the Angels (Don Baylor) and came to Colorado.

He wouldn’t put up an OPS below .853 for the next seven years of his career.

After posting an OPS of .895 in 1999 at age 35, Bichette left Colorado and his OPS immediately dropped over his final two seasons – .826 .786 – before calling it quits. Still not terrible, but clearly a significant drop-off after leaving Coors.

Castilla has basically the same story.

He posted five straight years of an OPS of .850 or better before dropping down to .809 at age 31. Then he was traded and dropped to .562. Over the next six seasons, he topped out at an .812 OPS with Houston. He gutted out a few more tough years in Atlanta before returning to Colorado where his OPS immediately blossomed to .867 at age 36.

He left for Washington the next season and fell down to a .722. Castilla did not post an OPS over .600 for his final three years.

All of these players have the circumstantial elements of having played their Coors Field days right in line with their primes for the most part, and during an era known for outstanding offense (let’s leave it at that for now).

Even for Bichette and Castilla, you could make the case that they just happened to be better in Denver because that’s when they happened to personally be at their best. Still, if anyone wants to call either player a Coors Field Creation, or at least attribute much of their production to their environment, it would be hard to fight them too hard.

While Walker, Burks, and Galarraga were able to prove they could be monsters with the bat outside of Coors Field, Bichette and Castilla simply could not duplicate.

We cannot say for sure that they could not have had decent careers if they had played their primes somewhere else, but we just don’t know what they would look like one way or the other.

One last thing to keep in mind with this group, of course, is that they all played before the implementation of the humidor.

Even if we reject any other possible answers for why they all succeeded in Denver and reach the conclusion that the ball yard played a pivotal role for each of these players, all we have proven is that Coors Field used to take average hitters and turn them into great ones prior to 2002.

For now, what we have is two players (Burks, Galarraga) who were just as good outside of Colorado as they were inside of it and one player (Walker) whose success here was clearly driven by underlying talent far more than anything else.

With Bichette and Castilla, we have the strongest evidence from that era that you can get more out of some hitters by bringing them to Coors. The question then becomes whether or not this is repeatable and whether or not there are actually players who are worse in Colorado than they are everywhere else. Spoilers: There are.

As we move through the next era of Rockies baseball, we will need to keep these players in mind and try to identify the patterns because one thing is clear from the outset of this exercise: Coors Field doesn’t impact everyone the same.

Check back next week as we dive into the Todd and the Toddlers era and discover even more fascinating elements of the Coors Field Conundrum.