Baseball hysteria soars a mile high in Denver : As the no-respect city goes batty for Rockies baseball, some still hate to see Zephyrs strike out.

In a city where boosterism is considered a civic duty, Denver spent most of the ‘80s in a blue funk. So much went wrong that people began thinking perhaps the loathsome Eastern Establishment had been right all along: Denver wasn’t really major league.

The high-flying economy took a belly flop, the beloved Broncos kept making it to the Super Bowl and getting clobbered, the Denver Symphony failed and had to be reorganized as the Colorado Symphony. The new orchestra is much improved, but Denverites still smart that it couldn’t survive under the banner of the city’s name.

“Denver, I think, has long suffered from a cultural and media insecurity complex,” said Tom Noel, a historian at the University of Colorado at Denver. “We wanted to be considered a big-league city, but everything we said about ourselves just sort of bounced around the vast, empty Great Plains and never was heard in Los Angeles or New York.”

Suddenly, though, there’s no more talk about a wounded city psyche. Having won the major league baseball franchise it had courted for 30 years, Denver is on a Rocky Mountain high. Not since the National League Braves left Boston for Milwaukee in 1953 has a city gone quite as batty over the prospect of a ball team’s arrival.

The Colorado Rockies--a National League expansion team that begins play next year and will be the only major league club in the mountain time zone--has been so inundated with telephone requests for tickets that one receptionist, Diana Alarid, lost her voice for two days.

To date, the team has commitments for 24,168 season tickets, including one from a Nebraska farmer who noted that after 12 hours on a tractor, a five-hour drive to the ballpark in his Cadillac would be a piece of cake.

“We’d love like hell to catch the Dodgers,” Rockies spokesman Mike Swanson said. The Los Angeles Dodgers sell the most season tickets in the majors--27,000, which they voluntarily cut off at that level to ensure that individual game tickets are available throughout the season.

To critics who said Colorado was too sparsely populated and too infatuated with football to support major league baseball, Denver already is smugly pointing to the likelihood of hitting 3 million in attendance next year.

Half the pedestrians on the 16th Street mall seem to be wearing Rockies caps, and each morning advertising executive Lew Cady pins on his shirt a new button that announces the number of days left to the ’93 season opener. Plans are even afoot to entice Pope John Paul II to a baseball game during his Denver visit next summer.

And the waiting list for season tickets for the football Broncos has shrunk over the past couple of years to about 7,000 names from 18,000, although the Broncos aren’t fretting that attendance is about to plummet. They have performed before sellout crowds in this sports-crazed city for 21 straight years.

The Rockies will play their first two seasons at High Mile Stadium, current home of the Broncos and the city’s minor league baseball team, the Zephyrs. In 1995 they are to move into a new home, Coors Field, now the site of an abandoned downtown freight yard near Union Station. The $140-million park will be financed by a 1-cent tax on every $10 purchase in the six-county metropolitan area.

At a Chamber of Commerce lunch recently, the stadium architects, HOK of Kansas City, unveiled preliminary proposals that included a boulder placed in the right field bleachers, a mountain waterfall in center field and a view of the real Rockies beyond the outfield wall.

With ground to be broken late this summer, souvenir hunters have started swiping bricks from crumbling buildings on the site and fathers have brought their kids to the empty, rocky yard to play catch on what one day will be a manicured green infield.

Meanwhile, over at Mile High, the lame duck (and first-place) Zephyrs are rattling around their 75,000-seat stadium, drawing about 2,000 fans a game. The team, once known as the Bears, was considered the nation’s premier minor league franchise in the ‘70s. It has sent more than 600 players to the majors since 1955 and holds the record for the largest crowd ever to see a minor league game (65,666 in 1982).

The end of Denver’s minor league tradition after 91 summers stirs a sense of loss in some fans. No more will they be able to buy the best seat in the house at the last minute, stretch their feet over an empty row of seats or shout insults the opposing manager can hear. Instead of boning up on batting averages and ERAs, next year they’ll be learning about deferred compensation and free agentry.

Said Dick Kreck, a longtime regular in Section 117: “Will major league baseball be better? Probably. Will it be more fun? Unlikely.”