Patrick Reusse: Best not forget, baseball season is a long one

BOSTON - Baseball's regular season is the longest marathon in sports. You can find schedules that consume more than six months, but none that contain 162 games, that call on the athletes to compete in an average of 6.2 games per week.

There is a strong urge in the media to take a small sample and draw ironclad conclusions on where a ballclub is headed.

For instance, watching the 2006 Twins during a May-June road trip to the West Coast made it easy to dismiss this as a team destined to finish under .500 and as low as fourth in the American League Central. The Twins turned a 25-33 start into a 71-33 finish and won the division.

And an old-time sportswriter was left kicking himself for all that June gloom and for again failing to remember the grand game's most accurate cliché: "It's a marathon, not a sprint."

There are worse examples of this forgetfulness -- none more so than in an April 22 column written for the Denver Post by Mark Kiszla.

The Colorado Rockies were 7-11 that morning and in last place in the five-team National League West. They were coming off six consecutive losing seasons in which the averages were 72 victories and 90 losses.

Kiszla decided on bold action.

"Something must be done," he wrote. "Boycott the Rockies."

The Post columnist said the fans should stage this boycott until owners Charlie and Dick Monfort agreed to sell the franchise.

"Launch a website dedicated to finding new ownership for the Rockies ..." Kiszla urged the Rockies fans among his readers. "Protest in front of the ballpark on the first day of every homestand, urging patrons not to enter the gates and support lousy baseball."

For the grand finale, Kiszla wrote: "We deserve better than to be played for fools. ... Trade Todd Helton? Wait around to lose Matt Holliday as a free agent? Grow old while the Rockies never get a sniff of the World Series?

"You, the great sports fans in Colorado, are tired of the wrong answers. Raise your voices and be heard. Charlie and Dick must go."

Kiszla turned 50 in June, which can make folks feel as though they are growing old. Yet, the Rockies did celebrate on Monday the six-month anniversary of Monforts-must-go by loading into a charter jet and flying off to Boston for final World Series preparations.

Baseball's 103rd Series starts Wednesday night in Fenway Park, with the Rockies arriving as a team of mystery for two reasons:

One, they have a nucleus of young standouts unfamiliar to all but the most hardcore of fans; and two, it's only a guess as to what an eight-day layoff will have done to a team on a historically hot run.

After losing at Philadelphia on Sept. 13, the Rockies lost back-to-back home games to Florida on Sept. 14-15. They avoided a sweep with a 13-0 victory on Sept. 16. They have lost once since then -- 13 of 14 to end the regular schedule, a playoff victory over San Diego to earn a wild-card berth, sweeps of Philadelphia and Arizona ... 21 of 22 in all.

The two parties most concerned with TV ratings -- Fox and Commissioner Bud Selig -- got a break when the Red Sox came back from down 3-1 to smash Cleveland 30-5 in a three-game winning streak.

What everyone with a rooting interest in the game could use now is an upstart Colorado team to still have its edge, resulting in a long, dramatic World Series.

A year ago, St. Louis defeated Detroit in five games in a dull and shabby Series. The previous two were sweeps, and only interesting because both Sox (Red and White) ended incredible droughts. The Red Sox went 86 years, 1918 to 2004, between World Series titles, and the White Sox topped that at 88 years, from 1917 to 2005.

There hasn't been a Series to admire for the quality of play and its level of tension since 2003, when the young, underdog Marlins defeated the Yankees in six games.

Florida did this when Jack McKeon, the septuagenarian manager, sent out Josh Beckett on three days' rest and he pitched a 2-0 shutout in Game 6 in Yankee Stadium.

Four years later, the Rockies, another young, underdog team from the NL, storms into the World Series, although with a major difference:

Beckett, the difference-maker from '03, now pitches for the big-spending, star-filled club from the AL, for the Red Sox.

The Rockies will see Beckett out of the chute on Wednesday, and if they can hang tough in that game, we'll know the Rockies' heat has survived a week of batting practice, intramural scrimmages, rain and snow, and we'll have an eventful World Series.

Patrick Reusse can be heard weekdays on AM-1500 KSTP at 6:45 and 7:45 a.m. and 4:40 p.m. • preusse@startribune.com