Rockies gain a lot of fans in Rocktober

Rocktober brings out posers.

Yeah, you heard me right. There are people who couldn’t list more than four Colorado Rockies players a week ago who are suddenly big “fans.”

I get it, to a degree. The baseball season is long. It can be boring to follow unless you are a fantasy baseball league geek (which I aspire to be but failed pretty miserably this season).

Still, the Rockies deserve support prior to crunch time. Some dude at Capitol Creek Brewery was wearing a Rockies’ jersey Saturday night, so I assumed he was in the know. I walked up to him right before the first pitch of the game at 6:10 p.m. and asked if he had pestered the bartender yet to turn on the game.

It soon became obvious he was A) drunk and B) didn’t know beans about the Rockies. “They’re not playing tonight,” he slurred.

It’s the last weekend of the regular season, I reminded him. Of course they are playing. They are locked in a battle for the division title with the L.A. Dodgers.

Turns out he assumed since the Rockies had already clinched at least a wild-card berth they were taking time off. I refrained from further talk with the poser.

Anyway, the 2018 assembly of Rocks are anything but dull. They have an excellent nucleus of young arms. After trying with mostly poor results since their founding in 1991 to find pitchers who could handle Denver’s mile-high altitude — which favors hitters — they have finally found fearless young hurlers such as Kyle Freeland and German Marquez.

They have a great mix of veteran and young position players who are maddeningly capable of banging out 15 runs when the bats are booming but then go into a dry spell where they struggle to hit the proverbial broad side of a barn.

I was screaming at the TV during the nail-biting win-or-go-home wild-card playoff game Tuesday night. One minute I celebrated a critical strikeout by a Rocks’ pitcher and the next cursed when a batter failed to bring home a run. My 14½ year-old-dog raised her head every now and then to see what the commotion was in our usually reserved home.

“Hey,” I’d tell her, “it’s Rocktober.”

scondon@aspentimes.com