Winter is supposed to be a hopeful time for baseball fans. To get ourselves through these short, cold days with no games to watch, we get to dream on what our team could be next season. There is at least the excitement of new arrivals on the team, the potential of a new lineup, and the hope that comes with the fact that you think your team might be good when there are no games to prove you wrong.
It doesn’t even have to be major moves to instill some excitement. It does need to be some moves, however. And the Rockies have made none, joining the Chicago Cubs as the only teams to have spent $0 on major league contracts this offseason. So it is that the Rockies have robbed their beaten down fans of the typical hope that can get us through this time of year. As Kyle Newman notes here, that leaves us with rooting for Larry Walker to make the Hall of Fame as the only potential for excitement.
Larry Walker ‘grateful’ for support ahead of Hall of Fame vote | Sportsnet
It’s amazing how much progress Walker has made over his time on the ballot considering how unlikely this all felt a few years ago. It used to be that Walker was thanking people for support because his goal was just to stay on the ballot for 10 years. Now he’s grateful for support that’s definitely going to get him close to 75% of the votes and very well might get him in.
It’s very on-brand for the current leadership of the Colorado Rockies to squabble with a star player over a relatively small difference in money. Nick Groke notes in this piece that these gaps in arbitration often prove to be nothing, but current trends in Colorado make it such that this disagreement might be more meaningful.
20/20 Retrospective – The 20 greatest Rockies players in the 2000s | 104.3 The Fan
Let’s end on something fun. Let us know which guy on this list makes you smile and go, “Oh yea, THAT guy!” For me it was Jeffrey Hammonds, followed closely by Jeff Cirillo.