The baseball is going to Dad.
After Kyle Freeland did what only happens about once every 50 years, making his major-league debut as a starting pitcher in his hometown for the home opener, the noise was so loud at he could feel it in his bones.
Freeland beat the 2-1. He smacked his first base hit. He earned the victory. He got cheered by 49,169 of his new best friends in the ballpark, including John Elway.
“He got a big-league win. A big-league knock. So he checked a few boxes off,” Rockies manager Bud Black said Friday.
But know what’s really cool?
On one of those Colorado afternoons made for snapshots, we were all witnesses as Freeland struck out a half dozen Dodgers, allowed a scant four hits and went six innings strong. And then there was this: In the bottom of the fifth, Freeland stepped in the batter’s box, saw a fastball he liked and knocked it into right field for his first big-league hit. Who will get that baseball as a memento?
“I’ll give that to my dad,” Freeland said.
So I went looking for his father, and found Don Freeland standing in the hallway just outside the Rockies’ clubhouse. His pulse was normal. His smile was wide. So I offered a handshake and asked if he was ready to do a little math.
As a youth-league baseball coach, how many pitches did a devoted father figure he threw in batting practice to Kyle, his older brother Colin and all the other little dudes that took cuts in the cage.
“Letap see,” Don Freeland said. “When you’re pitching to kids, you’re trying to hit the bat almost as much as they’re trying to hit the ball. Over the course of 12 weeks every summer, I probably threw somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 pitches a week between two teams. I did that for 12 years. … Man, thatap a whole lot of pitching.”
If my math is correct, thatap 432,000 pitches, give or take a curveball.
“And he’s feeling it now. … His arm’s hanging by a thread,” said Kyle Freeland, laughing.
The father added: “I think I might need rotator-cuff surgery.”
There’s a million ways to measure a father’s love, and throwing nearly a half million pitches in BP is devotion so real you can smell the analgesic balm for that aching shoulder.
Don Freeland threw 432,000 pitches when nobody bought a ticket to watch.
Against the Dodgers, Kyle Freeland threw 95 pitches, and whole the city of Denver cheered, with such deep emotional attachment it reminded us why a town can fall in love with a team.
You do the math: 432,000 divided by 95. Yes, a father’s commitment was great through the years on the sandlot. But the payoff was even better on an opening day nobody will ever forget.
“When the armed forces came in before the national anthem, thatap when it really hit me: ‘Kyle is a part of all this.’ My heart didn’t start racing. But thatap when I got emotional,” Don Freeland said.
His youngest son was born in 1993, the year Colorado joined the National League. There’s a photo of baby Freeland wearing his Rockies onesie. Nearly 24 years later, at 1:20 on a 74-degree afternoon that Abner Doubleday had in mind when he invented the game, the 6-foot-4 Rockies left-hander who reminds scouts a little of ace Chris Sale took a seat in the home team’s dugout, looked out at the expanse of green grass and soaked in a dream come true.
“It was awesome,” said Kyle Freeland, who told me the last time he pitched in Denver as a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School, there were maybe 200 people in the stands.
Baseball is a game of fathers and sons. Playing catch. But forget the poetry; here’s whatap real: As the mother or father of any youth baseball player can attest, spring in Colorado tests parental resiliency to the max, especially when sitting on those frigid metal bleachers as the snow flies.
Don Freeland will soon be the proud owner of a baseball souvenir, the ball his son smacked for a single at Coors Field, where a city adopted Kyle Freeland as its favorite son for the day.
All it took was 432,000 pitches.
