It isn’t easy building a World Series contender on a shoestring budget. It takes grit and savvy and a lot of luck. And sometimes, as was the case with the Rockies and Diamondbacks, a little desperation doesn’t hurt, either.
Yes, these teams have earned their way to the National League Championship Series. Yes, they have drafted and developed several top-notch young players. Yes, they have shown immeasurable patience and weathered countless storms in front of near-empty stadiums.
What, like they had a choice?
In a perfect world, or what the Rockies once thought was a perfect world, they could have cut through the learning curve with a big-name, free-agent signing or two. They could have eased some of the growing pains by doing what the Yankees and all those other mega-market clubs do – throw money at their problems.
But they couldn’t because they’ve been there, bungled that. Back in the day, they overextended themselves with free-agent signings that, to be kind, didn’t pan out. In the process, they left themselves no choice but to swallow hard, go back to basics and develop their own stars.
Therein lies the strongest common bond between the last two teams standing in the National League. Both clubs fired out of the blocks as expansion teams, the Rockies making the playoffs in their third season, the Diamondbacks winning the World Series in their fourth. But in time, both paid a big price. And eventually, neither could afford to.
What to do? Go young.
“We have (had) to do it,” Diamondbacks manager Bob Melvin said. “I mean, financially, where our organization is, we’ve kind of had to do it. Our payroll has been reduced significantly since the last playoff years here in 2001 and 2002. … So it’s one by design, and two out of necessity.”
Same with the Rockies. The Rockies have the 25th-ranked payroll in the majors at $54 million, with the Diamondbacks next at $52 million.
Now for the fine print: The Diamondbacks, like the Rockies, overspent years ago and wound up in dire straits. But the D-backs parlayed all that wild spending in their early years – their $103 million payroll was the fourth-highest in the industry in 2002 – into a World Series championship and three postseason appearances in a span of four seasons.
“There’s a lot of common fabric with the exception that they’ve had more success than us,” Rockies manager Clint Hurdle said. “They’ve been able to get to some places that we’ve wanted to get to.”
Mirror images
And three years after beating the Yankees in the 2001 World Series, the D-backs lost 111 games. Then came an all-out commitment to youth.
If the story rings familiar in Denver, it should.
“There’s a very similar flavor between the two of us,” Rockies general manager Dan O’Dowd said. “We’re a little younger in our pitching and they’re a little younger in their position players. But it’s a very similar model. It’s almost identical.”
Said Hurdle: “We’ve done the same thing. Ours was, I think, more out of necessity than anything else. And once we put it in play, we both have followed through. We’ve both backed up our young players with patience. And our scouting department continues to do a good job in having another wave coming, as theirs has. … We’re both in good places as far as scouting and player development.”
It’s not just that, though. It’s not just that both teams faced the same harsh realities and chose the same path to overcome them. And it’s not just that both had to fade several white- elephant contracts – Matt Williams, Todd Stottlemyre and Jay Bell, just to name a few for the D-backs, and Mike Hampton, Denny Neagle and Mike Lansing for the Rockies – before becoming competitive again. Those are just a few entries on the long list of similarities between the franchises.
Mirror images, Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki calls them, and with good reason.
“Both teams play the game hard,” Tulowitzki said. “We run out stuff, we do the little things to win games. There’s definitely a reason why both teams are where they’re at.”
Both teams have hit home runs on draft day, and not just with early can’t-miss picks. The D-backs drafted star-in-the-making Justin Upton No. 1 overall in 2005, one year after selecting Stephen Drew in the first round, and two years after cashing in with Conor Jackson in the first. But they also developed Brandon Webb, a humble eighth-rounder in 2000, into a Cy Young Award winner in 2006.
The Rockies? They selected Jeff Francis (2002) and Tulowitzki (2005) in the first round, then hit lightning in a bottle with Garrett Atkins in the fifth and Brad Hawpe in the 11th, both in 2000. And they stayed the course with a great athlete drafted during the Bob Gebhard regime – Matt Holliday, a seventh-rounder in 1998 because he had the option of playing quarterback at Oklahoma State.
“Great team chemistry”
Both teams also share a certain esprit de corps, one of the key ancillary benefits of developing players and bringing them up as teammates through the minors. Their players are friends, not free agents passing in the night. They play hard, they possess savvy beyond their years, and they care about each other on and off the field.
Oh, and each team has an elder statesman to mentor the kids.
“Over here, we have Tony Clark and they have Todd Helton,” Diamondbacks center fielder Chris Young said. “He’s been working with young guys over there as well as Tony has with our guys over here. That’s the reason they’ve accomplished so much and they’re doing so well. They have great team chemistry. You can see it on the field, just like you can see it with ours.”
Not that, until the teams’ playoff runs, many fans were around to witness it. The Rockies’ season-ticket list, once the envy of the industry at 34,000-plus, had dwindled to less than 14,000 by the start of the 2007 season. Doug Davis, Arizona’s Game 2 starter, thought of the crowds at Chase Field, or lack thereof, when he was acquired from Milwaukee last November.
“There were crickets out there,” Davis said. “Nobody was coming to the games. We came in last September, when they were still in the race, and it was very desolate.”
Said Diamondbacks left fielder Eric Byrnes, one of several players and front-office types who have moved in recent years from Colorado to Arizona or vice versa: “This is a team that has scratched and clawed for everything we’ve gotten all year. This is a team that has pretty much defied baseball logic …”
Defying baseball logic. Like, say, winning 19 out of 20 games in the heat of a pennant race and deep into the playoffs.
Jim Armstrong: 303-954-1269 or jmarmstrong@denverpost.com
