World Champion Chicago Cubs are in Colorado, the Rockies don't care, at all

DENVER – The Colorado Rockies are playing host to the Chicago Cubs this week. The Cubs enter as the reigning World Series Champions with a 16-15 record while the Rockies are streaking at 20-12. Maybe call it a youthful foolishness but the young Colorado club is not scared of the Cubs, their fans or anything they could bring with it.

The best news for the Rockies is that the Cubs come off of a series where they got swept at home their bullpen got obliterated due to an injury to one of their starters—Brett Anderson—and an 18 inning game. To couple with that, both Anthony Rizzo and Javier Baez were knicked up in the game and Jason Heyward has been unable to play for three days.

The Cubs have one of the most taxed bullpens in baseball as of Monday. Yet they still are fresh with rings on their fingers and talented as could be. Maybe it’s some ignorance or maybe it’s that many in Denver think that the Rockies can take advantage of the Cubs getting to their hotel at 7 am this morning, either way there is a good vibe at Coors Field right now.

Both manager Bud Black and Ian Desmond couldn’t stay awake to watch the whole game on Sunday Night Baseball. Meanwhile, the Cubs had to play in it then ship off to Denver.

“I watched the eighth and ninth, saw the tenth and eleventh, fell asleep, woke up and watched the sixteenth then found out the rest this morning,” Black said before he joked about the 22 innings he managed for the Padres against the Rockies in 2007.

Black didn’t put too much stock into the travel opting for the old momentum is the next day’s starting pitcher cliche.

“Players are conditioned for this stuff,” he said. “You go back as a minor league player and you ride that bus from Tulsa to El Paso or from Massachusetts to Buffalo and you roll into the Best Western at 6 am and you have a game at 1 pm. Players are conditioned for this.”

“I played six years in the minor leagues, way worse than that,” Desmond said. “You got 10 o’clock games, kids days. The worst one I had was we got done at about midnight in New Britain then we had a 10 am game, we weren’t flying private jets were sleeping at Best Westerns.”

“I think you feel it two days later because you have adrenaline tonight but I feel time changes a few days later,” Mark Reynolds remember a tough turnaround himself. “When the Yankees signed me I was at home and had to take a red-eye into Boston on Thursday night and I played. Saturday night during the first inning I was ready to sleep.”

Reynolds collected two hits basically coming off the street for New York, that Saturday night he wasn’t as lucky.

“Last year we had a makeup game against Pittsburgh at noon in Colorado,” Reynolds said of the rigors of scheduling in MLB. “We got in at 3 am and then flew out. One time in Cleveland we started at midnight. It’s tough you have to grind it out.”

When asked if he thought games should end in ties or they should play California Rules Baseball in extras he said, “No, that’s stupid.”

No matter the travel the Rockies are still hosting a very good team tonight, but the veteran attitude of players like Desmond has carried over to the youngsters.

“They were World Champs last year, this year they’re just the Cubs,” Desmond said. “That’s no disrespect to win a title is a big deal and they earned but this is a new year.”