On Monday afternoon, with the first pitch of the Rockies-Padres “play-in” game hours away, parking lots near Coors Field were charging $40 per car, far above the norm – even for days when business and baseball hours encroach upon each other.
LoDo ticket hustlers, who under normal circumstances often buy season-ticket holders’ tickets at a huge discount and then shoot to sell them at face value, at least in theory reached true “scalping” territory this time.
At the corner of 17th and Wazee, a young man in a Rockies cap was walking his dog, which donned a purple bandanna.
The fighter-planes’ flyover before the first pitch was one more indication that this was something extraordinary. It technically didn’t qualify as postseason baseball, yet Major League Baseball had come up with a wild-card tiebreaker logo to flash on the scoreboards and place behind home plate. And, yes, there was red, white and blue bunting hanging from the deck facades.
Jake Schroeder, who sings the national anthem at Avalanche games, switched sports to perform the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
The transformation in the past few weeks has been amazing.
As recently as two weeks ago, Coors Field was a low-decibel environment with thousands and thousands (and more thousands) of empty seats, with the Rockies seemingly on the verge of postseason elimination.
In the final regular-season series against Arizona over the weekend and then in the tiebreaker, Denver flashed back to the passionate days of the franchise’s fledgling seasons at Mile High Stadium, and even the first seasons at Coors Field.
When catcher Yorvit Torrealba’s solo home run in the second inning staked the Rockies to a 3-0 lead and he did some fist-pumping around the bases, it might have been pushing baseball protocol boundaries, but was perfectly in tune with the atmosphere.
Several hours later, after the Rockies scored three times in the 13th inning to pull out a wild 9-8 victory and advance to the divisional series against Philadelphia, the party was just beginning in LoDo.
