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A lot has happened in the world since 1993, evensome things outside of baseball. Crazy, right? So in

an effort to bring back some memories and put the Rockies’ lifespan in perspective, this timeline will run along the bottom of

Shortstops in each issue this season, providing a 20-year slice of history, represented by news bites, trends, award winners, pop culture, sports andmore. This will either make you feel very young or very old. Please acceptour sincerest apologies.

1993

The beloved show“Cheers” calls itquits after 11 seasons.

Bill Cosby winsthe Kid’s ChoiceAward for Favorite TV Actor.

(MILE HIGH MADNESS, continued from page 11)

have some influence on our expansion selections, although there were alot of factors there. We brought in players that we could afford and thatcould produce today and be a part of tomorrow. We signed AndresGalarraga the day before the expansion draft and he went on to win thebatting championship that year.”

With third baseman Charlie Hayes coming from the Yankees in thedraft and outfielder Dante Bichette from the Brewers in a trade the dayafter the draft, the nucleus of an offense that could take advantage of thespacious outfield was falling into place.

“I hadn’t seen Vinny Castilla play that much, and all of a sudden, hestarts hitting balls to right-center field in that gap out there, so I said,‘I’ve got something here,’” Baylor recalls. “He was a good guy to hit theball in that gap out there. He and Dante, they used the ballpark for extrabases. We got a lot of extra bases.”

Galarraga also made the most of the ample outfield acreage, and fewthings went further in keeping Rockies fans glued to their team thanGalarraga’s assault on opposing pitchers. His road average alone wouldhave been fifth in the league at .328, but combined with a .402 home av-erage, the Big Cat hit .370 for the season with 22 homers and 98 RBI.His successful pursuit of a batting crown gave the team instant credibil-ity and gave the fans something to cheer for, despite being en route to a95-loss season.

“Right away, Cat was one of the biggest stars coming to this teamthat people recognized,” Castilla says, thinking back on his days as theRockies starting shortstop. “Winning the batting title kept the fans in-terested in following him all year.”

To reconfigure the stadium from football to baseball—and backagain—the Rockies employed a unique, 450 foot long, 200 foot wide, 9million pound movable seating structure for its left-field stands. Usinghydraulics to lift the structure on a bed of water 1/3 of an inch thick be-neath it, the stands could be “floated” back 145 feet at the rate of two feetper minute, creating a 335 foot left-field wall, which had light-hittingright-handers salivating as they stepped into the batter’s box.

“I hit my first base hit against San Francisco and it was a home run,”starting pitcher Armando Reynoso remembers, laughing about his fourth-inning homer off Trevor Wilson on May 10 of the inaugural season.“That was the short part of the stadium. I got one more later, but thatwas my first base hit and I think I was more happy to hit the home runthan to win the game. I won the game, but for a pitcher, it’s nice to hita home run.”

Reynoso went 12-11 with a 4.00 ERA in the Rockies inaugural sea-son, earning the Opening Day nod the next year.

Made for Mile HighThere wasn’t much defense against a line drive into the left-field

stands, but the Rockies sought out players who could defend the spa-cious acreage in left and center field.

“I try not to remember too much of the outfield play,” says EY, whowas the Opening Day second baseman, but also started 38 games in leftand eight in center. “Fortunately for me, I had a pretty good centerfielder there, Alex Cole, who could cover some ground and took a lot of

the pressure off me. It was just a little different, but it was real big out incenter field, right-center, so he had to cheat a little more that side. I hadto cover the gap and anything down the line was pretty much a doubleor a home run if it was up in the air. The hard part was for the centerfielder and the right fielder because they had a lot more ground to cover.Actually, thinking about it, I think I was under-utilized in having myspeed in left field.”

Cole and left fielder Jerald Clark were the Rockies ninth and fourthround expansion picks, respectively, a pair of outfielders well-suited toeat up acreage. With Bichette in right, the Rockies did their best to min-imize opponents’ opportunity to find open space in the outfield.

“Big right field—huge right field,” Bichette says. “Bigger than [CoorsField’s] left field. It was crazy. I went from that big right field to this bigleft field. Man, I never had it easy. But it was fun.”

The expansive right field created one of the park’s highlights whenthe Braves came to town in late July of ’93. Curtis Leskanic matched upwell with Greg Maddux, but Deion Sanders drove a Leskanic offeringinto the right-field corner and got a favorable ricochet that sent the ballshooting past Bichette and into center, allowing Sanders to circle thebases for an inside-the-park home run.

“I think he could have gotten back to second base,” Rockies originalcatcher Joe Girardi says, calling it a six-base hit. “He hit it down the right-field line and it hit the corner and shot that way. He was basically jog-ging home.”

Even with the oddity of the dimensions, the most unique aspect ofthe park, as those who played in it recall, was the unprecedented presenceof 60,000 to 70,000 fans in the stands for a baseball team that lost 95games.

“Well, 82,000 made it unique,” Bichette says of the enduring single-game attendance record. “It was the beginning and it was rabid, man. Itwas crazy. 60,000 every night and 80,000 Opening Day. Cool place.”

“When we would play the Dodgers for a three-game series, you’d have210,000 people,” Girardi adds. “That stood out.”

Ensuring that Opening Day mark of 80,227 took some extra inno-vation for the day, and some bending of baseball’s rules.

“The owners had made up their minds that they wanted 80,000 peo-ple in the ballpark,” Gebhard explains. “For football, it held 76,000, sowe had to create a little over 4,000 seats.

“We put seats down the foul lines [on the field]. We put bleachersover the left-field corner and had to put a large television up there becauseif you sat in certain areas of those bleachers, you couldn’t see home plate.We put bleachers in dead center field behind the batter’s eye, and we gotpermission for one day to lay the canvas—the batter’s eye—down [angledback away from the field] so the people behind the batter’s eye would beable to see. Felipe Alou, the manager of Montreal, agreed to it, and thenext day we popped them back up, but we could put some more peopleback there by doing that.”

“I don’t know how Gebhard got all those people to sit in those seats,”Baylor marvels. “They were stacked high. Homemade stands, really. Idon’t know if I could have sat in those. But the people were so into base-ball in the Rocky Mountain Region. Everybody wanted to be there.”

(continues on page 142)