Fans Aren’t Mile High on Rockies Now

In existence a mere 10 years, the Colorado Rockies are already pining for the good old days.

The Rockies had the sort of promising start that no one expected: record crowds from the first day and a postseason berth in the franchise’s third season.

Since then, however, the Rockies have flamed out, becoming a consistent also-ran and a puzzling disappointment.

“We’ve all been frustrated that we got off to a fast start and haven’t been able to sustain that, as it relates to Ws and Ls,” said Jerry McMorris, one of the Rockies’ principal owners. “We haven’t achieved as much as a team or an organization as we’d like.”

On April 9, 1993, in the first home game, the Rockies drew a major league record crowd of 80,227 at Mile High Stadium. Although they struggled on the field that inaugural season, they drew nearly 4.5 million fans, another record.

They were on pace to break that mark the next season until the strike intervened.

The 1995 season, which didn’t start until late April after the strike was settled, represented the Rockies’ high-water mark.

Having moved into Coors Field, the Rockies went 77-67 and earned a wild-card berth, the shortest time it had taken an expansion team to reach the playoffs. Dante Bichette, Larry Walker, Vinny Castilla and Andres Galarraga each hit at least 30 homers, earning the moniker Blake Street Bombers, after the street the stadium is located on.

“We had so many fun times,” McMorris said. “Putting the ownership group together after we lost the original Ohio owners ... the tremendous turnout at the Convention Center for the expansion draft

“The opening day at Mile High -- I don’t know if you could script anything better than that, with the huge crowd and Eric Young hitting a leadoff homer. Then having Coors Field become a reality and Dante Bichette winning that first game with a home run in the 14th inning. Getting to the playoffs, that was another storybook moment.

“Those were all tremendous moments for us.”

The Rockies haven’t been the same since. Although attendance stayed strong -- the Rockies led the majors for seven consecutive years (1993-99) -- the team faltered. They have failed to win more than 83 games in any season since, finishing 73-89 in each of the last two years.

Ultimately, fan support waned. The club had never drawn a single-game crowd below 30,000 until last year, when it happened 29 times. Season attendance, which had never slipped below 3.1 million, dropped to 2.7 million.

Rockies’ season-ticket sales were believed to be about 24,000 last season, and McMorris said they will decline about 25% this year. “It’s a significant decline, but almost every team in baseball will have a significant decline this year,” he said.

Armed with alarming financial projections, ownership ordered General Manager Dan O’Dowd to limit player payroll to about $54 million this year and to rid the team of its high-salaried players. O’Dowd managed to ship off Mike Hampton but none of the others.

The signing of Hampton and Denny Neagle to multiyear contracts totaling $172 million in December 2000 was, in retrospect, probably the club’s biggest mistake.

“My biggest frustration? The hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve spent on free-agent pitching and have gotten little in return,” McMorris said.

As a result, the Rockies have approached their second decade with a new philosophy.

“We clearly have to grow our own pitching, and we need position players who are strong offensively,” McMorris said.