LITTWIN: It's too hard to explain, but the Rockies did it

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published October 16, 2007 at midnight

Text size  

• 0 Comments
• Email
• Print

Luck is the residue of design. Former Dodgers GM Branch Rickey

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.

American author and poet Bret Harte

Even if I could explain it, I wouldn't try.

Trying to explain how it is that the Rockies are going to the World Series would just risk spoiling it.

Let's see. It wasn't luck. And it wasn't karma. And it wasn't (only) the humidor.

It was, well, I don't know what it was - except completely and entirely unexpected.

Until, eventually, somehow, it became completely and entirely inevitable.

You explain that. The 50,000 fans at Coors weren't trying. They were sweeping their brooms and waving their towels and trying not to get blown away from the noise. If you weren't there, I can assure you the decibel levels were almost as high as a Matt Holliday home run over the center field wall.

But I hope you were there. Who'd want to miss this, even when it got a little tense at the end?

What may be the biggest surprise in baseball history turns out, in the end, not to be surprising at all. How much bigger a surprise can you get?

I mean, a sweep? Somehow a sweep seems to be taking the whole miracle thing just a little too far. I fully expected a broom to materialize on the wall behind center field. Or maybe at the top of Pike's Peak.

With the sweep of the Diamondbacks and the sweep of the Phillies, the Rockies have gone 7-0 in the postseason, which only one team has ever done. That was a team called the Big Red Machine, the Cincinnati Reds of 1976 - whereas the 2007 Rockies, before mid-September, were not quite even the Little Rockies Who Could.

They've won - I know you've got the streak memorized by now - 21 of 22 games, in a time span that now goes back a month and changed the universe, or at least the baseball part of the universe, or at least the baseball part of it that was still awake.

I don't know when you started to believe. This will be a matter of claims, and counterclaims, that will only grow more extreme, and more apparently prescient, in the years to come. Some will date it back to the Todd Helton walk-off homer. Many knew it when Tony Gwynn Jr. of the Milwaukee Brewers beat the Padres - the Padres of Tony Gwynn Sr. - with two-strike, two out hit. Or when the Rockies came up, two runs down, in the bottom of the 13th, in the tiebreaker.

It doesn't matter so much now. It's gone beyond belief now. It's gone to a shared creed - shared by a city and a region and a state now certain that the incredible is credible, that the inexplicable is explicable, that the Rockies have become something other than the Rockies we always knew.

We won't explain it. Or try.

It's better just to say it. We'll do it together. Your kids can do it at school. You can try it at work. The Rockies are going to the World Series. The Rockies are going to the World Series.

That it doesn't make any sense is what makes such wonderful sense.

That Clint Hurdle lifts his pitcher in the fourth inning for a pinch hitter, and the pinch hitter is someone named Seth Smith, and the pinch hit falls into the one spot in the field where no one can catch it and the Rockies go on to score six runs in the inning - that's the kind of sense we're talking about now. The sense that puts the Rockies in the Series against the winner of the Boston- Cleveland series.

There are some now who say we should have seen it coming all along. Like Al Gore's Oscar/Emmy/Nobel sweep. Or Tom Tancredo's decision to run for president.

Despite the fact that the Rockies have been the epitome of mediocrity for years, we should have seen they had suddenly figured out how to build a championship team.

It turns out, it was just a matter of destroying the franchise to save it. They put the baseballs in the humidor. They stuck the cash they might have spent for free agents under the owner's mattress. They compiled losing record after losing record. Coors Field, where they set attendance records, became the ballpark that baseball forgot. And, of course, that led, somehow, to a championship season, and everyone looks like a genius. Or a magician.

Forget that with two weeks to go in the season, the Rockies were only four games over .500 and far from assured of putting together their first winning season since 2000.

And so, I reject this theory - not because it's entirely wrong. But because it doesn't work. I reject it for the same reason that Robert Redford and company rejected the ending of The Natural - only the best baseball book ever written - in which (spoiler alert) Roy Hobbs strikes out. He tries in the end to do the right thing - and loses. Like in real life.

It didn't work that way in the movie, of course. And now, I guess, it doesn't work that way at Coors Field.

These are the days, as the lyric goes, of miracles and wonder. What I mean is: This is the Rockies season that fell from the sky.

It's the story you've been waiting for all your life. It's the lottery ticket that came in. It's the bet you can't lose.

When the Rockies go to the World Series - when the Colorado Rockies go to the World Series - all bets are off.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com.

Featured

• 2008 Voter’s Guide

  

  Use our Ballot Builder tool to compare your viewpoints to the candidates.

• A Dozen on Denver

  

  Sandra Dallas wrote 'Lennie's tavern' for our ongoing fiction series. Check it out!

• Rocky Multimedia

  

  The news comes alive in our videos and slide shows. Catch up on today's events.

• Bronco Dean's rant

  

  Listen to Bronco Dean's totally biased pregame rant about the Broncos-Jaguars game.

• Presidential Elections

  

  See how Colorado counties have voted through the years.

• County election profiles

  

  A look at how residents in each Colorado county may vote.

• A dream fulfilled

  

  A Rocky Mountain News and MediaStorm production

• Latest from Dove Valley

  

  Click for more broncos videos.

• Sam Adams' Open Mic

  

  No. 44 means a lot to Floyd Little