Just a quick note on yesterday’s game. We went to see the Cardinals play the Giants at AT&T park, and managed to get seats from Sarah’s work - they have a luxury box and rotate who gets tickets, so we went with maybe a dozen of Sarah’s coworkers and their families. This was the first time I ever had box seats, and it was pretty cool, especially the fact that the food was all right there and catered. I spent most of the time talking to other people, which is also nice, because you can go back inside and sit around there away from the game if you want. I had no real vested interest in either team, although I secretly wanted St. Louis to win, and they did.

Photos are on flickr, and here’s the link below. This was my first run with the new camera, and the zoom lens did great. I expect it to do even better if we’re close for a game - we were up in right field for this one. Good view of the water and the boats and bridges and people in canoes, though.

Opening Frickin’ Day, 2010.  Today’s the day my iPhone battery life is slashed to a third, because I pull it out ten times an hour to check scores.  It’s when I start leaving work at 6

so I can listen to the first three innings of a game in Colorado.  It’s when I start cursing the Montfort brothers for not opening their god damned wallets.  And this year will be even worse, given the fact that I just signed up for my buddy Joe’s fantasy league.  I did this in 08, and it turns out I signed up in 09, but then got in a car accident, so when I didn’t make the draft, Joe put my slot on autopilot.  It turns out my rudderless ship placed 5th out of 10.  So if I can’t do better than that this year, I’ve got bigger problems.

Now I compare every baseball season to the 2007 season, which is when I really fell in love with baseball and started considering myself a fan.  I, of course, greatly miss not being in Colorado right now, not living a block from Coors Field and being able to walk over on a lazy Sunday and pick up a seat in the 330s for twenty bucks, the section where I can look right down at home plate, look straight across at the scoreboard, or look slightly up and see, on a clear day, the majestic Rocky Mountains in the distance.  Coors Field may not have its Green Monster or garlic fries, and it may have other shortcomings (like the low-hanger urinals, which I hate) but the view is one of the best in baseball.

So, roll call - who’s still here, and who’s just a ghost of 07?   Garrett Atkins got non-tendered. In non-baseball terms, this is when your contract expires, and the management decides to say “thanks but no” on getting another deal. This is no surprise for Atkins - he lost his full time spot at third base last year to Ian Stewart, who essentially did a better job at roughly five and a half million dollars a year less salary. But he was a key face in the Rockies’ run to the World Series in 07, and part of me feels sad any time a piece of that team moves on from Denver.  In his case, he’s going to the Orioles, which is the baseball equivalent of being transferred from the head office to the Czech republic.

The biggest blow to that memory was Matt Holiday moving on this year to Oakland (and ultimately St. Louis.) He was one of those big “face of the franchise” players, an all star and home run derby king, and always a welcome face in left field. The Rox never get air time on Sportscenter, but when they did, it was almost always a Holliday play.  I cursed and cursed the Montforts for not giving him a better deal and pushing him away, and my offseason Sabermetric exercise I never got to was calculating how the Rockies would have done statistically with him in left field.  But Carlos Gonzalez stepped up, and Holliday dropped that catch that basically shut down the Cards, so it all works out in the end.

Yorvit Torrealba is gone, which I have mixed feelings about.  I actually named my car Yorvit, because when I first bought the Yaris in the fall of 07, I kept forgetting the name Yaris.  Anyway, he’s gone on to the Padres, which trumps going to the Orioles tenfold in the “step-down” department.

Probably the biggest name I will miss in ‘10 is not a player, but announcer Jeff Kingery. He’s called Rockies games since day one on 850 KOA and the rest of the Rockies network. when I started this whole affair back in 07, I went to as many games as I could, given that I worked from home and lived only a block from Coors Field. but on the days I could not attend, I’d tune in to KOA and listen to the games as I hacked away on Ruby on Rails code. Listening to a ball game in the radio has this hypnotic allure to me, something I can do as I work on something else and pull in the dribble of numbers and stats from the AM radio ether. we didn’t have cable back then, and I’d only catch games on the tube if we were at a bar or restaurant where the game was on a flat screen in the corner. but I prefer listening to the games. Now I will watch every Rockies game that’s on TV, but now that we’re out of market and I’m too cheap of a bastard to shell out for whatever premium package you need to see every Rockies game.  Knowing Comcast, I probably have to buy some $70 a week plan that includes professional curling, Lacrosse, and the Kobe Bryant channel, and won’t let me just get MLB TV.  At any rate, I get the At Bat coverage on the iPhone, and can listen to 850’s feed in the car on the way home, which is always weird to me.

Predictions?  Rockies will take the NL west if they can keep together their pitching, which is the big question right now.  If the Dodgers are able to take the division, I have a good feeling the Rockies will get the wild card.  I think the Giants have absolutely everything in place to do stellar this year, but every year that happens, they are beaten, bloody, and fucked by the end of May with their entire offense on the 365-day DL.  I think the Cardinals will take the Central, and there’s no way the Phillies won’t take the east.  And there’s probably no way the Phillies won’t take the NL.  Also in the East, I think the Nationals will enjoy their first season not in the cellar, thanks to the trainwreck of injuries known as the Mets.

AL?  Sort the teams by payroll, take the top four, then the top two, then the top one, and that’s who will win the World Series.  Why again am I not a fan of the AL?

Okay, time to start combing over the numbers to get ready for our draft in 10 hours…

So I’m moving photo pages (again) to Flickr.  And in that vein, I have moved all of my baseball pictures into one collection there:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkonrath/collections/72157623497422165/

There are 32 sets (30 games, 2 stadium tours) going from the first game I ever went to in 2006 up to last season.

I can’t wait for this season to start.  We’re hoping to plan another long weekend in Denver, and I will have a real camera and a huge zoom lens, so I’m hoping for some good pics.  I will also probably try to get in a game in San Francisco.  The Rockies won’t play in Oakland this year, and they are doing so bad and the Coliseum sucks so much, I’m not sure I will go to a game there, but if I run across cheap tickets or I get insanely bored or really need a fix, who knows.

…baseballs, I mean.  Calm down.

First, here’s a little early xmas present I got myself the other day: a signed Troy Tulowitzki ball. I netted it from eBay for only twenty bucks.  The guy also had Matt Holliday and Jason Giambi balls going for about ten bucks toward the end of their auctions, but I did not splurge as much as I could have.  This is only the second ball in my collection, the first being a Rockies spring training 08 ball that John Sheppard gave me at my wedding reception. I need to avoid getting into this particular hobby, though.  I think the ideal baseball collectible is the stack of plastic cups I have on top of my fridge.  They’re ideal because they always change from season to season and stadium to stadium, and every time I buy a five dollar Coke at the ballpark, I add to my collection.

On the subject of this, I saw this movie last night on Netflix called Up for Grabs. It was the story of the 73rd home run ball hit by Barry Bonds in the 2001 series, and the fight between two men who each claimed they caught the ball.  The story in a nutshell is that one guy caught the ball but then apparently dropped it when he was tackled by a horde of people, and this other dude picked it up in the ensuing melee. Of course, both sides disputed this, especially since the ball was going to potentially auction for a few million bucks.  Spoiler alert: a judge ordered them to auction off the ball and split the proceeds.  Fine, except the plaintiff in the lawsuit ran up something like $650,000 of legal fees and essentially made this lawsuit his full-time job.  When the ball got auctioned off almost two years later, it went for about $450,000, which the two guys split (and then had to pay income tax on.)  So yeah, sucks for that guy. There’s a lot more to the story, but it was an entertaining documentary. If you have netflix, give it a look - it’s watchable online (or on your PS3 or Roku box, if you’re now doing that.)

The moral of the story, I think, had to do with the greed and sensationalism of current-day baseball, which isn’t a good thing to have rolling through your head as you’re cruising through eBay listings looking for Rockies collectibles.  So I’ll stick to collecting the plastic cups for now.

Oh yeah, I have not updated since the end of baseball season.  People keep commenting about the Yankees buying the World Series, because it’s great to hate the Yankees.  My general opinion on that is, “eh.”  It’s no secret teams with high payrolls have more success, except the Mets have the second-highest payroll and 2009 didn’t work out so well for them (24th place in win/loss); the Cubs threw down about $135 big, third in payroll size, and finished like 7th in a 5-team division.  (OK, it was 16th of 30) The Marlins were dead last in payroll and almost won a wildcard; the Mariners shed almost $20 million, but they still spent more money than the Phillies did to win the World Series in 2008.  Houston is in the top ten money served, but finished 24th.  And my beloved Rockies just barely made the top twenty in the salary department, but were sixth place overall. So more payroll means more success, except when it doesn’t.

I’m pretty neutral about the whole Yankees hate thing, except for the fact that I’m a fan of whoever is playing the Red Sox, and that makes me somewhat happy they were able to win.  But I only passively watched the games.  It seems like it was months ago that the Rockies lost, and I’m starting to get the itch, wishing I was back at Coors Field with AM radio in ear, and a bag of Cracker Jacks in my lap.  I think this will be a tough year, hot stove-wise, since a lot of my favorites from the 2007 series may be going elsewhere.  (Hawpe, Atkins, Torrealba) and some of the big weapons of this year will also wander elsewhere (Beimel, Giambi, Betancourt).  Hopefully, the owners will lock down some good names for 2010.  And hopefully, I’ll get at least one weekend at altitude to see a few games.

Until then - winter ball?  I don’t think the iPhone has an app for that…