Mile High Mouth debuts with Rockies’ ramblings
Attention . . . now batting for BaseballBigMouth . . . pinch-hitter . . . Mile High Mouth . . . Let’s give our newest writer a warm welcome! Even though he’s a native of Georgia, and a resident of Denver, Mile High Mouth has been certified by natives of Eastern Massachusetts as a true Red Sox fan. However, he doesn’t like to look at baseball from a Sox lover (or a Yankee hater) perspective. Mile High Mouth likes to look at the hard cold unforgiving numbers, look at baseball with what his friends call “an insanely optimistic outlook on sports”, and then find the middle ground. He spends most of his free time drinking coffee, wandering around the Front Range, and wondering why Futurama got taken off the air.
Even though the snow is blowing here in the Mile High City, those of us who are into baseball are already thinking of cold beers, short-sleeved t-shirts, and a warm afternoon at Coors Field. No doubt the t-shirt most Rockies fans will want to wear bears the title “NL Champs 2007″. Even though the Rox fell short to Boston in the World Series, this town is still excited about what happened. It’s hard not to be. Towards the end of the season people at work were telling me “All they have to do is win one more game, this team has to lose, and then they win the tie-breaker and they’re in!” All I had to say was “There is no way that’ll happen.” Dumb-founded, and delighted to be wrong, the Rockies went on to have an amazing post-season performance and succeeding when tons of us who are not die-hard fans of the Mile High City sports franchises believed it wouldn’t last.
It’s all well and good to be excited about what happened, but now comes the burning question that everyone in baseball is asking (even if it is at the back of their mind). Can the Rockies pull it off twice? Those who have hope in a repeat of “Rocktober” will tell you that it’s going to happen. For those of us who are more skeptical, we need smaller questions answered within that bigger question. The first question is who is coming back. The one thing everyone in Denver was hoping for was the return of Troy Tulowitski. He came back (at a hefty price tag), but the man is a dedicated ball player who will go so far as to up the rigor of his work out if he makes an error during a game. It’s hard to not want that dedication.
Matt Holiday and Todd Helton are coming back for another round on Blake Street, as is Torrealba and Spilborghs. One could say as far as hitting and fielding goes, Colorado doesn’t have a lot to worry about. That is to say their line-up shouldn’t be weaker than the 2007 line-up. The big question mark is how they are going to handle the bullpen this year. The Rockies starters are less than impressive. Some people like to look at ERAs, but I’m a bigger fan of looking at their full record. I have to say, aside from Jeff Francis I’m not that impressed. Jeff Francis won 17 games out of 26 chances last year. Pretty good. The ERA is higher than it usually takes for me to be impressed, but when I looked at the rest of the Rockies bullpen….It puts him above the rest. Seems that the average pitcher for Colorado has as, at best, as many losses as wins, and a four at the beginning of the ERA seems to come standard….even for Francis. However, I am not a pessimist by any standards. Although, I am not impressed with the bullpen thus far I will give them a few things. To start off with they are young. A young bullpen is awesome because they have places to go instead of places they’ve been, and they are hungry to prove what they’re worth. Top that off with a shot at a World Championship, and I think you’ll find you have a lot of pitchers out there who may want it more than a ball club who has a dream bullpen, and veterans who already have titles.
It’s possible that I could be just buying into this city’s fanatical devotion to it’s local sports teams, but I’ve got evidence to back up these claims. Besides, anyone who follows baseball can tell you a lot can happen between now and October. Who would’ve called the Twins and the Braves in ‘91?