The Coors Effect
There is not much to say about the drive from Kansas City to Denver. Maybe there is one thing. If you do this drive Kansas is going to gaslight you into thinking it is going to be gorgeous. For the first hour and a half to two hours of the drive, the state is full of rolling hills and prairies. I was so awe-struck I had to stop and take a picture. But it turns into flat, monotonous farmland very quickly. So let’s just fast forward from about the time I got on the highway and my GPS told me to just go straight for the next 550 miles and talk about my weird time in Denver.
There’s a lot of weird things in Denver. My family members living there take the cake as the weirdest parts of Denver. I got to spend some time with my brother Thatcher at his new house. He has gotten very into croquet and has started calling his new place “The Country Club.” They track croquet and Catan wins. This is very on-brand for him.
And unsurprisingly, Thatch has racked up countless wins in both.
I then spent the next two days with my cousin Hannah. We did a day where we visited Boulder and we happened to be there during pride! We walked around the festival which was held at a park in the center of town. This was my first pride I have gone to and I’m excited to say it was weird in all the right ways.
Finally, on my last night in Denver my cousin Danny, Hannah, and I went to a Rockies game. On the way to the game cousin Danny had to get his weird in for the day. Danny was talking about his new hobby of fat-washing drinks. This is when you take some sort of animal fat and mix it into alcohol to create a richer flavor and different mouth feel. Danny pointed to examples of folks doing it with bourbon. Danny had tried a couple of combinations of liquor and fats already. He decided his next fat-washed drink would be hot dog vodka. Daniel gave this concoction a tagline: “Relishing Putin, get musty on my glizzy.” I don’t want to try to explain what this means, so I won’t.
Just like everything else in Denver, baseball is weird a mile high. Like Kansas City, the Rockies have a spacious outfield. But there is a bit more reasoning to it in Colorado. Due to the elevation, the air is thinner in Denver, so the ball can travel much much further. There is even a strip of purple chairs in the stadium to indicate where exactly a mile above sea level is. In the baseball world, it is known as “The Coors Effect.” Pitchers generally have a tough time as well, as the air also changes the way spin affects the movement of the baseball on its way to the plate. So it’s got a big outfield, pitchers struggle there, and the baseball goes further. This has led Coors Field to be one of the highest offensive environments in all of baseball. To say the least, I was expecting runs and lots of ‘em.
Despite the Brewers having a strong pitching staff and the Rockies being a bad team there was a chance there would be little action. But, I was correct. Scoring got underway quickly as the Rockies got a two-run homer in the 2nd. They added to their lead with a solo home run by Charlie Blackmon in the 3rd. But the Brewers punched back and tied the game with some small ball, hitting line drive singles, and good base running. Then in the 5th, the umpires ruled Brewers player, Joey Ortiz, out on the base paths. I had just seen this happen in Kansas City. This time I didn’t agree with the call. Neither did Brewers manager Pat Murphy. He went and gave home plate umpire, Brennan Miller, before being ejected. This clearly had an effect on Murphy’s players because, in the very next at-bat, William Contreras hit a solo shot to give the Brewers a lead. I was sure that the Brewers would win at this point. But never let a good bullpen and pitching staff trick you into thinking the game is over in the 5th. The Rockies took the lead back right away. The Rockies then gave themselves a nice cushion in the 7th, making the score 6-4. In the 8th the Brewers rallied again. The game kept going back and forth. The game was tied after 9 innings and would be going to extra innings.
This was the first and only extra-innings game of the trip. Weird things were happening in Coors and it was gonna get weirder. In the top of the 10th, with 1 out and runners on 1st and 3rd Rhys Hoskins grounded to the third baseman who threw it home to tag out the runner and keep the game tied. Then in the bottom of the 10th, the Brewers switched to a very unusual defensive alignment. The Rockies had a runner on third with one out. Anything in the outfield would score the winning run on a sacrifice fly. So the Brewers decided to give up an outfielder to bring another player into the infield. They then loaded the bases so they had a force out everywhere, including home. The goal was to get a double-play ball. The Brewers never got out of that jam. On the first pitch he saw in the at-bat, Jake Cave hit a single to right and walked it off for the Rockies. Weird game for lots of reasons. Rockies win 8-7.
