FanPost

This Is Where It Starts - My Die-Hard Fandom Origin Story

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So you may find yourself living an entire state and an entire time zone away from home. And you may find yourself slumped deeply into your IKEA sofa at 12:38 AM on a weeknight, eyes half open, watching the final three routine outs of a routine butt-kicking of the Padres. And you may also find yourself, phone in hand, paging through the boxscores of minor league games to see if Sam Hilliard got another hit in Lancaster. And you may find yourself doing all of this wearing your Nolan Arenado jersey t-shirt, which you're only wearing because your CarGo shirt and your Helton shirt and your Jon Gray Tulsa Drillers shirt are all in the dirty clothes pile in your closet.

And you may ask yourself two questions: "Does he know this is a really lame Talking Heads homage?" And, naturally, "How did I get here?"

This is the short version of how I got here.

It starts with an Opening Day, naturally, because all good things begin on Opening Day. Even an Opening Day for a season like 2003, which never looked to be anything special, and wasn't. But after the Rockies took one in the teeth from the Astros on the first day of the season en route to a series loss, it was back to Denver for that most magical of days, a Chamber of Commerce Friday afternoon in my hometown. Whatever classes I might have had on that particular day of my junior year of high school could wait. Coors Field was calling.

Then, there's a strike. Not one thrown by Shawn Chacon; that would come later. I'm talking about a strike I threw, in an inflatable game area across the street from the park at some fan festival in an area that's now occupied by lofts and a rooftop bar. All I had to do was throw a baseball through a target some 20 feet away, and I won a prize. And considering my ERA that season of high school baseball was something like 1.03, let's just say I was in the prime of my strike-throwing life. I rippled the netting with my first attempt and was handed four tickets to the next day's Rockies game.

Then, there's the game itself, once the pageantry is past and the sellout crowd settles in. And the aforementioned Chacon came out throwing plenty of strikes. After the fourth inning I looked down at my scorecard in my seat down the right field line and noticed the Diamondbacks didn't have a hit. When they failed to record one in the fifth, the buzz arrived in the ballpark as everyone talked around what they knew to be unfolding.

Chris Stynes hit a homer in the bottom of the fifth to give Chacon a lead, but Chad Moeller harshed the buzz with a one-out double in the next half-inning. Still, it was the longest I'd ever seen a no-hitter last in person, and the adrenaline surge lasted all the way through Jose Jimenez recording the save in a 3-2 Rockies win.

Saturday arrived, cold and gray, the polar opposite of Friday's conditions. I took the ACT that morning and went with my dad and brother back to 20th and Blake right after. It was then that I truly understood the appeal of season tickets. When you go to the yard on back to back days you almost feel like you're on vacation from something, like you're cheating life by escaping to a baseball game the day after you just went. I don't know why it feels that way, but it does.

The Rockies trailed 3-0 in the fifth against Randy Johnson, but somehow came back to win the game. That's a sentence that makes just as little sense now as it would have then. Preston Wilson's RBI double in the 10th sent the much smaller crowd home happy, me maybe more so than anyone else.

The 2003 Rockies were a total hodgepodge of a team – other than Todd Helton, Larry Walker and Aaron Cook, you could comfortably tell the story of the Rockies as a franchise without including any of the members of that squad. They were not particularly good, and despite being over .500 as late as August 9, they petered out to a 74-88 finish. There is not any one particular reason why that team should be memorable, or should have been the catalyst for anybody's relationship with their favorite team to accelerate to a different level.

But if I hadn't been to Opening Day... if a no-hit bid hadn't had the fans all aflutter... if I had been struggling with my command as a member of the Grandview Wolves and failed to hit that target and hadn't won tickets to the next day's game... if Preston Wilson hadn't jump-started his 144 RBI season with a walk-off win to make that chilly Saturday worthwhile... if the giveaway on Opening Day hadn't been a schedule calendar that I kept faithfully pinned to my wall throughout the entire year... if that hadn't been the summer my best friend got his drivers license so we could make trips downtown to see games...

If none of that had happened... oh, who am I kidding, I'm not sure anything would be different, actually. But it all starts somewhere, the path we follow until we are too far lost to think of anything else other than all that encompass Rockies baseball, from home/road splits to the affairs of the Hartford Yard Goats. For me, it just happened to start with the best day of Shawn Chacon's Rockies career. And it has always been comforting, in the worst of times, to know exactly who to blame.

Eat. Drink. Be Merry. But the above FanPost does not necessarily reflect the attitudes, opinions, or views of Purple Row's staff (unless, of course, it's written by the staff [and even then, it still might not]).

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