Rockslide

Oh that baseball, it is a funny game. One night it's as tense as can be. The next afternoon, it is ludicrous. A laugher for one team, an entity lacking humor for the other.
Joke's on us this time. When your best chance to stay competitive is to send Ramon Castro from first to home with two out down ten in the fifth, you try to chuckle and keep a smile on your face.
What over? Not Pelfrey, except maybe the thought that an off day means he is skipped a turn which means, in turn, Coach Rick can run him through a few more of his magical “bullpens” and perhaps yield Ollie-like miracles. Not Sele or Burgos either, each of whom lost the keys that keep a door shut. Not much on our side of the ledger (Reyes revives, Endy endures, Green gratifies) that accounted for beans in the scheme of things.
But try to find a good thought or two for our counterparts in Colorado, the serious Rockies fans who are lapping this one up and downing it with a cold clean Silver Bullet. I'm sure they're out there, I'm sure they needed this.
I don't have any particular use for the Colorado Rockies, but it's rather sad to see what's become of them over the last decade or so. They were the model franchise in waiting when I visited them in their spanking new playpen a dozen years ago, en route to the first National League Wild Card, performing marvelous offensive feats nightly in front of adoring throngs. Beyond conferring resident scholar status upon Superintendent of Schools Mike Hampton and installing that humidor (or humid-id-or, as Keith memorably called it last summer), I don't know what the hell happened to them. Nor do I much care. I sure won't when we're subject to Coors Field fireworks when the Mets are in Denver around the Fourth of July.
Still, bad for baseball that the most promising of its four most recent expansion markets has lost its elevation. You should have seen the Rockies fans in 1995. They were so enthusiastic, so into their duel with the Dodgers for first, so full of hope and passion. There hasn't been an N.L. West race since then that has involved them in any meaningful fashion.
They do seem to have a molehill if not a mountain of young talent: Atkins, Holliday, that irritating shortstop with a rifle for an arm and a howitzer for a last name…Tulowitzki, yes, that's it. Sprinkled in are admirable vets (Finley), annoying vets (Mabry), pesky vets (Carroll) and insanely overpaid vets (Helton). Their pitching is anybody's guess considering the altitude they spend half their time hurling through. It's looked good for two days, though.
The names may have been moved around but this is basically the same jumble of Rockies that comes to Shea every year and doesn't win too often. Colorado last recorded a victory here amid Mike Piazza's last appearance as a Met at the very end of 2005. Before then, their previous win was a Sunday in May 2002. How long ago was that? It was so long ago that Kane Davis took the loss.
Nowadays, to the extent we dare to be at all presumptuous about our standing in the sport, we sort of, kind of expect to beat teams like the Rockies. It wasn't long ago when we were the Rockies, expecting absolutely nothing but hoping like hell that our Phillipses and our Wiggintons and our Seos were going to mesh with our Piazzas and our Floyds to create a better tomorrow. When we'd rise up and take a game or — holy crap! — sweep a series, as we did from Colorado in August 2003, we'd cherish every inning and hold it as tightly to our collective bosom as we could until reality snapped back and slapped us in the face.
I'm pretty damn stingy about giving up games, but considering it's already gone, I'm willing to loosen my grip on this afternoon's for the sake of fans I've never met in a place I haven't been in a long time. They could use one.
Enjoy it Rockies fans and build on it. You play the Braves next.