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The one thing I'm hopeful for in the Rockies' early season

As far as I'm concerned, most of the 2016 season will be a success if the Rockies can just avoid one thing.

By Mitch Hahn
Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

Welcome to the 47th Purple Row edition (and 151st overall) of Tuesdays With Mitch, where the one-seeds always go down to the underdogs. Let's get into it...

Spring Training is (slowly) rolling along. Each meaningless game in the desert brings us a little closer to actual, real-life Major League baseball being played in Colorado. The refreshing sight of box scores are back in the newspaper and clips diving catches are back in my Twitter feed. Jerry and Jack are calling games when I get in my car on my lunch break. Chatwood's back! Story killed it yesterday! Gray is making adjustments maybe kind of! None of this really matters!

Anyway the return of all of this baseball talk inevitably leads me to start anxiously awaiting the real games that come around in April. So I started thinking about the beginning last year's campaign. Specifically I began to recall one very, very frustrating aspect of the 2015 season:  The awful, terrible, no-good, bad, sucky, horrible, bleak, lame-ass weather.

It was unrelenting and borderline unbearable.

Yes, the Rockies were bad last year. But the constant rain delays and postponments were perhaps worse than the losing. Most fans expected a good amount of losses. But the weather, that was some never-before-seen stuff.

The Rockies were rained out in Denver, snowed out in Denver (in mid-May), rained out in Los Angeles, and rained out in San Diego. A fireworks game on Memorial Day weekend suffered rain delays, so they just lit the fireworks during a delay because everybody in the crowd was leaving. In-game fireworks! The Rox even played tic-tac-toe with the Dodgers on Twitter during a delay.

At a point in mid-July the Rockies (and their fans) had sat through over 26 hours of delays. That number is mind-boggling.

So why do I bring up all of this gloom during Spring Training, a time when our minds are filled with visions of sunshine and cold beer? Well, I think I just stumbled upon the Rockies' number one priority for 2016.

If they can just avoid a constant stream of awful weather in 2016, I think I'll be a satisfied fan. Yes, I'll be closely monitoring the development of young players, the performance of tradable assets, and even the teams' wins and losses (what a concept!).

But I'm also planning on setting the bar pretty low for 2016. If I head down to Coors on a warm spring evening or Sunday afternoon, I don't want to get pummeled with rain and stand on the concourse freezing because the weather changed and I didn't bring any warm clothes, which is always the case. If I get home from a long day of work, I want to flip on the TV at 6:40 and watch an actual baseball game, not the same episode of Rockies Real Time over and over. (Jenny Cavnar interviewing Nolan Arenado was played approximately 4,000 times last June.)

I can be reasonable in my request, too. I'm not asking for perfect weather for all 162 games! I get it. Spring and summer in Colorado are bound to bring some unpredictable weather. There will be delays. There will be postponments. But can we avoid snow in the middle of May? And can we avoid 26 hours worth delays? According to my calculations, that's adds up to more than an entire day!

Around here, we're all so focused on baseball and what happens between the white lines that it can be easy to forget about all those delays. But  the regular, rain-related interruptions to the rhythm of a 162-game schedule played a major role in making the Rockies' 2015 a really bad season.

So please Rockies, you have a new goal for 2016. Just don't get rained on as much as last year.

It might be all I ask this year.

Now we proceed to the weekly departments...

Stud of the week:

I don't know where this came from (I even researched it for like, almost a minute) but it appears to be a pretty badass walkoff and bat flip (bat spike?). I'm really just including it here because it appears to be a cool clip from a real baseball game. Those are neat!

Ass of the week:

This mascot sucks.

He just pops up like he didn't crush three of his friends. What an ass.

Vine of the week:

This Kansas fan had a very reasonable reaction to Wayne Seldon's enormous dunk.

Turns out that is Seldon's uncle. Here's a more complete video:

Photo(s) of the week:

Yikes, man. Don't give your kids phones in public ever.

A bunch of other stuff the internet had to offer:

Boston College just finished a winless conference season and this poor kid gave the most depressing/hilarious answer in the history of press conferences.

Here's something you've never seen in a basketball game. Good on the dude who got ridden like a donkey to laugh it off, though!

All (Colorado's own) Reggie Jackson wanted was a high five from Stan Van Gundy. That shouldn't be too much to ask, coach!

Nice work on the self-censorship Rajon!

And finally, I hope you didn't miss this sequence. It sent the game to a FOURTH overtime. Unreal.

Happy Tuesday, everybody. Thanks for readin'. See ya next week.

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