Not to go all Sally Field on you, but yeah, we were beginning to get a bit of a complex.
Matt Holliday? Gone. Jay Cutler? Gone. Brandon Marshall? Gone. Carmelo Anthony? Going, going . . .
So when Troy Tulowitzki told us he really liked it here and would like to stay, we said sure, fine, whatever. Let’s see.
Tuesday, we saw. What do you know, the dude actually meant it.
“I’m not going to be one of those guys,” Tulowitzki said. “I’m here to stay. And hopefully we can do some special things here.”
Old school. If you’d bet five years ago that the Rockies would be the best-run major- league sports franchise in town by 2010, you’d be building a Mike Shanahan-style chateau about now. (Go ahead, soccer fans, fire up the complaint machine.)
Colorado baseball fans have three things to celebrate today:
• Tulo, a unique player and blossoming star, has committed to being the face of the Rocks for the next decade. It will be so long before his contract has to be revisited that Dan O’Dowd suspects somebody else will be general manager by the time it happens.
• Jorge De La Rosa, written off as a lost cause as recently as a week ago, will be back in the fold, the second front-line player to decide this offseason that playing in Colorado is worth more than chasing the last dollar somewhere else.
• Your Rocks are committed to being more than a farm club for the big-market big spenders.
“Your actions have to speak louder than your words when you’re running and managing a professional sports team or any organization that has some kind of public affiliation to it,” O’Dowd said Tuesday.
“We said all along we’re going to try to keep our own core star players here. Now, that takes a two-way street, and it takes compromise on both parts, but I think this is an indication that we certainly are willing to step up and do everything within the team concept.”
Among the Rocks’ Big Three, that’s one down, one on deck and one . . . well . . . let’s face it, one longshot.
Carlos Gonzalez made his decision when he hired Scott Boras to represent him. We have been down Boras Boulevard already with Holliday. We know where it leads. Stars in the Boras stable become free agents. So CarGo has two choices. He can fire Boras or he can be traded before he becomes eligible for free agency in four years.
That leaves Ubaldo Jimenez. Long-term, big-money deals for pitchers are the riskiest in pro sports, as the Rocks learned a decade ago with Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle. Of course, they know U-ball much better than they knew either of those guys. Nevertheless, an arm injury can change everything for a pitcher — not to mention the team on the hook for his guaranteed money — in an instant.
With Jimenez under contract for four more years, there is no urgency to wrap him up for longer, but if he has another Cy Young-type campaign in 2011, look for the Rocks to offer him a longer deal next winter.
Skeptics might argue that locking down Tulowitzki and bringing back De La Rosa don’t really improve the Rocks since both were on board last year too. But that’s not quite true.
For one thing, De La Rosa missed more than two months last season with a finger injury. He ended up making only 20 starts and winning eight games after making 32 and winning 16 the year before. So a healthy De La Rosa next year would be a bigger upgrade than anybody the Rocks could have found on the open market this winter. Add him to Jimenez and young Jhoulys Chacin, and the Rocks could have the strongest front end of a rotation in their history.
And while Tulo would have been here next season anyway, his statement of career commitment to the Rocks just became the club’s top sales pitch to other players.
If we’re going to condemn mercenary players for chasing the last dollar (and we are), we should be just as quick to celebrate a player with the common sense to know that a nine-figure contract to play in the most beautiful place on the planet is a home run pitch he can’t pass up.
The Broncos are a bit of a mess at the moment. The Nuggets may or may not have their best player by the trading deadline. The Avs are basically starting over.
And the Rocks? The Rocks will be built around a sensational young shortstop for the next decade. Merry Christmas. If you’re looking to make spring training plans, pitchers and catchers report in a little more than two months.
Dave Krieger: 303-954-5297, dkrieger@denverpost.com or
