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.
sports
resize text 
Newspaper Subscriptions
eEdition
RSS
Newsletters
