MEDIA CLIPS – July 15, 2017 The Colorado Rockies and Coors Field: A tale of struggles, homers and acceptance By Albert Chen / Sports Illustrated | July 14th, 2017 Before we get to the top-secret projects, or the ghost stories that will make your hair stand on end, or the key to cracking the most baffling puzzle in baseball, let’s begin with the first pitcher chewed up and spit out by the beast. It was 1993, the first year of major league baseball in Colorado. In front of 67,000 fans at Mile High Stadium, freshly minted Rockies closer Darren Holmes dashed from the bullpen to the mound, unaware that he was heading straight into the teeth of the monster. “I thought I was Lee Smith,” recalls Holmes, then a brash, goateed 27-year-old righthander whom the Rockies regarded so highly that they had taken him with the fifth overall pick in the expansion draft five months earlier. In his Denver debut Holmes gave up three straight singles, a double and a walk before recording his first out. He threw 24 pitches and allowed seven runs in a 19–9 loss. He took the mound again in the following game, and with the chance to close out a 4–2 win, Holmes—suddenly unable to locate his curveball, his signature pitch—walked the first three hitters he faced, allowed three runs to score, blew the save and took the loss. The previous season, in Milwaukee, he had been one of the best relievers in the game. It took two weeks in Colorado for him to be banished to the minors, his confidence in pieces. The list of pitchers who have been crushed by the beast is long—they range from the prominent to the obscure, from high-priced free agents to waiver-wire pickups, from that first Colorado team to members of the 2016 staff, which 1 was among the majors’ worst. Holmes and his 1993 teammates could not pinpoint the reasons for their diminished powers in their home park, but they did begin to notice strange things in the thin air: breaking balls that didn’t break and baseballs that jumped off the bat “like golf balls on the moon,” as Tony Gywnn would put it. “The second season, people started talking about the effects of altitude,” says Holmes. “Then we moved to Coors Field [in 1995], and the mystique of pitching in altitude got bigger and bigger, and the beast has gotten so big now that it’s all people think about.” Holmes rejoined the big league team later in 1993, and he ended up pitching for the Rockies for five often successful seasons before leaving as a free agent. Three years ago, while enjoying a quiet life in retirement as an independent pitching coach in North Carolina, he got an unexpected phone call. It was the Rockies, coming off a 96-loss season and still trying to solve the puzzle of high-altitude baseball, asking Holmes to return as a coach. “To come back to the scene of the crime,” he says. As he spoke, Holmes, now in his third season as a bullpen coach, was sitting in the coach’s locker room in Philadelphia one afternoon in late May. Colorado was the surprise of baseball: the leader in the NL West with a young pitching staff that was then on pace to post the lowest ERA in franchise history, in a season in which home run rates across the majors were at a record high. (The team has cooled off since then but still has a 7.5-game wild- card lead with a nearly league-average 4.45 ERA through Sunday.) The start was beginning to prompt questions about whether the Rockies, after all these years, might have finally figured out how to slay the beast. To those questions, Holmes only laughs. The man knows better. He will tell you: No one will ever kill the beast. ***** This is the 25th season of the Rockies franchise, and there is still something refreshingly singular about baseball in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains: the electric purple uniforms that make traditionalists’ stomachs turn; the breathtaking vistas—a life-sized Bierstadt painting just beyond the outfield—and hail storms that seem to have blown in from north of The Wall in Westeros; a brand of homer-happy baseball that seems controlled by 12-year-olds with joysticks. After years of analysis—physicists across the country have made a second living off Coors Field–related study—there are no more mysteries about why baseball in Colorado is the way it is. It’s no secret that because games are being played at 5,200 feet, where the air density is about 80% of what it is at sea level, air resistance is 20% less, baseballs carry 20% farther and breaking pitches move 20% less. (If you have your doubts, “The 2 Coefficient of Restitution of Baseballs as a Function of Relative Humidity” is available online.) It’s also no secret that pitchers are at a further disadvantage because reduced oxygen levels at altitude tax the body and make recovery after each game and workout more difficult than at sea level. And it’s no secret that pitching at Coors Field is the toughest and, perhaps, the least desired job in baseball. Any longtime Rockies player will tell you so. They remember what Mike Hampton, still the highest-paid free-agent pitcher in franchise history, said after he left in 2002 with a 6.15 ERA just two seasons into a eight-year, $121 million deal: “I was going to prove it could be done or die trying. I almost died trying.” They remember what venerated pitching coach Dave Duncan said while with the Cardinals: “I don’t think there’s any circumstance I would feel comfortable as a coach in this ballpark. It would challenge me beyond my ability to accept the challenge.” Holmes, who played with the Braves after leaving Colorado, recalls the Atlanta teams of the early 2000s adjusting their all-world rotation so that their best pitchers at the time would be skipped in Colorado. “It was, Which one of the three is going to win the Cy Young?” he says. “Because whoever’s got the best statistics, we’ll hold them out.” Still, one can find evidence—sporadic, not sustained—of pitchers enjoying success in Colorado. When Dodgers starter Hideo Nomo tossed a no-hitter in 1996 at Coors, the event was hailed like a moon landing. “I’m betting it won’t be done again,” L.A. first baseman Eric Karros said at the time, and 21 years later he’s still waiting. The Rockies, with a better-than-league-average staff, went to the World Series in 2007, and the team made the postseason again in 2009. But they haven’t returned since. Year after year, while Colorado’s offense consistently ranks among the league’s best, the pitching conundrum remains at the root of the losing. (In all but eight years of the team’s existence, the staff has ranked dead last in the NL in ERA.) To solve the riddle, the Rockies have gone to extreme measures, from the installation of a ball-storing humidor in 2002 to the implementation of a four-man rotation in 2012 to last season’s raising of fences. Five years ago the Rockies held their starters to a 75-pitch limit, with three ‘piggyback’ relievers eating the middle innings. The plan was initiated by then general manager Dan O’Dowd and referred to within the executive offices as Project 5183, in honor of Coors Field’s base elevation. When it was unveiled to the public, it was bold, it was revolutionary—and it was a massive failure: The staff again finished last in ERA as the team lost a franchise-worst 98 games. “You start to think of every freaking thing to not get your ass handed to you year after year,” says one longtime official. “And I mean every freaking thing.” 3 The Rockies have conducted studies into weather patterns, into heat and humidity on game days. (The Rockies are the only team in baseball with their own weather station at the ballpark.) They have hired a slew of consultants. For every idea that has been put in place, dozens have been discussed but either scrapped or set aside. Years ago officials considered turning the ballpark into a dome and pressurizing it to mitigate the effects of the thin air. More recently the front office and training staff discussed converting the entire home clubhouse at Coors Field into a hyperbaric chamber to help players recover in an environment where there’s a lack of oxygen. “Every little thing has been studied. One approach was, ‘We’re going to run all the time to be more in shape than the other guys,” says reliever Adam Ottavino, who, in his sixth season, is the longest-tenured pitcher on staff. “But the only thing that happened was that everyone was just tired all the time.” While the humidor did restore some sanity (scoring dropped by nearly 20% in its first year, before going up again in recent seasons), Coors continues to be by far the most inflated offensive environment in the sport. Since 2001 runs per game are about 33% higher there than the league average. The franchise that’s undergone more reboots than Spider-Man has hit the reset button again this spring with the hiring of former Padres manager Bud Black, the team’s fourth skipper in nine years.