Wrigley Field West, aka Coors Field, was crawling with Cubs fans on Tuesday night.
Fans like Darren Bellini from Rock Falls, Ill., who’s rooted for the Cubs since his grandmother, Pearl, indoctrinated him when he was a toddler.
Bellini, now 45, has lived in Littleton for the past 26 years, but he’s a Cubs fan, not a Rockies fan. He and his buddy, Adam Hurst, come to Coors Field every time the Northsiders invade LoDo.
“We call it our annual downtown pilgrimage,” said Bellini, who proudly wore the jersey honoring Ryne Sandberg, the Hall of Fame second baseman who died last summer.
The announced crowd at Coors on Tuesday night was 29,302. The crowd seemed larger, probably because of the energy brought to the ballpark by the non-Rockies fans. If blue-and-red jerseys and Chicago ballcaps are an accurate barometer, Cubs fans ruled — by a lot.
‘How can’t you notice it?
Rockies manager Warren Schaeffer anticipated that would be the case. He doesn’t like that the Rockies’ home is often a haven for visiting teams, but he knows it’s true.
“It’s not just the Cubs,” he said Tuesday before Colorado shut up Cubs fans with a 7-3 victory. “When it’s the Dodgers, it’s blue over on that side. Because when I coached third base, it was like enemy territory on that side of the field. With the Cardinals, (it was) all red over there.
“Does it bother me? Absolutely, it bothers me. Do I notice it? You absolutely notice it. How can’t you notice it? It’s loud for the other team in our own ballpark. Now, how much is that on us? I would say all of it’s on us.”
The Rockies, 25-42 entering Wednesday night’s game, are headed toward their eighth consecutive losing season. They are trying to avoid losing 100 games for the fourth consecutive season.
Schaeffer, however, is confident that change is on the way.
“I would say that when we start winning a ton of games, which isn’t that far in the future, that the blue is going to morph into purple,” he said. “I’m color blind, so it looks the same, but to other people it’s going to be more purple, and I look forward to that day.”
Veteran left-hander Kyle Freeland, a Denver native, made his major league debut in 2017 and had the best season of his career in ’18. The Rockies made the playoffs in both of those seasons, so he knows what Coors Field feels like when the hometown team is good. But it’s not that way now, and it bugs him when fans pile in for the visiting team.
“I understand that certain teams’ fan bases travel very well, like the Cubs, but when you see fans for other teams, like Houston or Cleveland, come in here and take 30-40% of the seats, it’s annoying and it (ticks) me off,” he said.
Chants of “Let’s go Cubbies” were muted on Tuesday night when Colorado took an early lead. But there have been plenty of other games where Coors feels like Wrigley. Rockies players notice.
“Yeah, it’s felt in the dugout,” Freeland said. “We look around, and it’s like, ‘Man, this doesn’t feel like a home game.’ Dodgers, Cubs, Giants, they hit a home run, you hear it. Or I walk to the mound and I look around and think, ‘Wow! There is a lot of blue, there’s a lot of (Giants) orange. It eats at you.”
A state of transplants
There are plenty of reasons why Cubs Nation thrives in Colorado. For decades, Cubs games were broadcast nationally on WGN — a so-called superstation — that helped create a multigenerational fanbase across the country, particularly in the Midwest and Mountain West.
Hurst, a Colorado native who grew up in Lakewood, was already 13 by the time of the Rockies’ inaugural season in 1993. By then, the Cubs, via WGN, had stolen his heart.
“Yeah (announcers) Harry Caray and Steve Stone were my guys,” Hurst said.
Just under 41% of Colorado residents in 2024 were born in the state, That means that roughly 3.6 million of Colorado’s roughly 6 million residents came from outside the state. Most transplants from the U.S. were from California (407,000) and Texas (221,000), followed by New York, Illinois and Ohio, each with at least 100,000 current Colorado residents.
Skip Perry, owner of in Golden since 2008, is one of those transplants. He proposed to his wife, Paula, on the scoreboard during a Cubs game at the Friendly Confines in 2007. Paula is a Colorado native who grew up in Arvada. Now she has split loyalties between the Cubs/Rockies and Bears/Broncos. After all, she helps run a bar and grill for lovers of all things Chicago.
So, what is it with all of the Cubs fans in Colorado? When the Cubs finally won the World Series in 2016 in seven games, about 750 fans poured into Perry’s bar, a place that could seat about 400 at the time.
“First of all, there are a lot of us here,” said Skip, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of Waukegan. “Plus, the Cubs were always lovable losers, so we banded together. My grandfather said to me, ‘The Cubs are going to win the World Series in my lifetime.’ Then my dad said it.”
Skip’s mom said it, too, but she died at 92, two years short of the Cubs’ first title since 1908.
When Skip and Paula were younger, they would rent a bus, load it with 75 Cubs fans, and head for Coors Field.
“It started getting a little bit too crazy for us,” Skip said. “We had to make sure to round everybody up after the game when some of them were trashed. Cubs fans can drink a little bit. So we just decided to host a watch party here.”
Of course, it’s not just the Rockies players and their manager who get tired of seeing Coors morph into a Chicago hot spot at the foot of the Rockies.
“I hate it when the Cubs come here,” said Brad Ricker, a longtime Rockies fan who shares season tickets and attends about 20 games a season. “I usually avoid coming to the Cubs games, because their fans are so obnoxious. But this is a game I drew in the lottery this year. It’s not so bad because we are kicking their (butt) tonight.”
Bellini makes no apologies for his allegiance to the Cubs.
“Listen, I don’t generally come to Rockies games,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ll go on occasion, but I root for the Cubbies. But I love it here at Coors. It’s a beautiful stadium, and you can’t beat the weather.
“I came out to Colorado for the first time when I was 5 and we stayed at my uncle’s house. We sat outside in July and we didn’t get eaten alive by mosquitoes, and you didn’t die from the humidity.
“I told my dad when we were driving back, ‘I’m going to live in Colorado someday. He chuckled, but I moved here as soon as I got out of high school. But all of my allegiances stayed in Illinois.”
