FanPost

FanPost Friday: This is how I was almost a Rockies fan

larry walker scowl dot jpeg - Tom Hauck/Getty Images

This week prompt is about your earliest sports memory. Here's poster iwasaRadio with his early memories of the Rockies (the baseball team, not the mountains).

Like many young soon-to-be baseball fans in the early 00's, I played a game called Backyard Baseball, specifically the 2001 edition. However, unlike many young soon-to-be baseball fans in the early 00's, I grew up in Portland. Unburdened by "favorite teams," I developed a liking for a few baseball players purely based on their appearance within the game - players like the Reds' Ken Griffey Jr. (He wears his hat BACKWARDS, mom!), Cal Ripken Jr., Chipper Jones, and - most importantly to this story - Larry Walker and Shawn Green.

You should be familiar with Larry Walker. He's the closest thing the Rockies have to a Hall of Famer, though, much like Edgar and the DH, purists like to discount his candidacy because of circumstances beyond his control (namely, Coors Field - pre-humidor). Shawn Green is a guy who had a pretty good career as an outfielder for the Dodgers.

The second part of this story's setup is about my family. Specifically, my dad went through a period from the late 90's to the mid 00's where he worked as a contractor for companies in transition. From our perspective, this meant he would work for a lot of companies and be away from home a lot. In summer of 1999, he found a job in Denver that looked like it might hold, so in the Summer of 2000, my brothers, my mom, and I piled into an airplane and headed for Colorado to visit.

I was 7 years old at the time, so my memory of the trip is very spotty. I've seen pictures of us on some sandstone rocks at one of the many parks there. It's a funny story for my dad that we apparently went to a really cool water park and none of us kids remember it at all. But the part I do remember, quite well, is attending the July 24th, 2000 baseball game between the Colorado Rockies and the LA Dodgers. Why? because the starting Right Fielders were one Larry Walker for the Rockies, and one Shawn Green for the Dodgers.

I was excited to see Walker and Green mash some taters like they did in my video game. And it was Year 2000 Coors, the environment so offensively favored that it features as a default park adjustment on Baseball Reference's "More Stats" page. So I was basically in prime position to see a multi-homer game from one of them. We had seats along the first base nosebleeds, and I had my glove. I wasn't going to catch a home run, but the thing about guys who hit balls far is that they hit foul balls pretty far, too.

Alas, it was instead a rare low-scoring game in Coors, and the Dodgers won 4-1 because some dude named Gary Sheffield came a single short of the Cycle (which I found out by looking up the game just now). Three days later, both teams would erupt for a 16-11 Dodgers win featuring a 6 RBI game from another random nobody, Adrián Beltré. Larry Walker missed his chance to hit a Foul into my glove and make me a Rockies fan for life. Such is Baseball.

In the end, my dad's job didn't hold. My family ended up moving to Seattle in 2004 instead, and I spent my summer as a new kid in a new town with no friends watching Ichiro break the single-season hits record on the TV. That's how you turn a kid into a fan, Larry, sheesh.