ROCKY ROAD SURVIVOR

DENVER -- Clint Hurdle stood in the middle of the Colorado Rockies’ clubhouse, champagne and beer dripping from his hair and a wide, weary smile creasing his weathered face.

Last week’s raucous celebration of the Rockies’ first National League title had been a long time coming -- especially for Hurdle. For more than three decades, Colorado’s once-impatient manager had been trying to rush to the top of the baseball ladder, first as a No. 1 draft pick, then in a mostly disappointing 10-year playing career and finally as the manager of a team that finished nearly 100 games below .500 in his first five years at the helm.

Along the way he endured two failed marriages, a trade, three releases and a reputation as the can’t-miss prospect who did. Then, just when he thought things couldn’t get worse, his second daughter was born with an incurable genetic disease.

And that’s when Clint Hurdle discovered what had been missing from his life.

“I’ve had to learn patience through challenging times,” he said. “That’s been good. It’s proved to become an asset, especially in this profession.”

But Madison Reilly Hurdle has taught her father -- and his team -- much more than that. As she has battled through repeated hospitalizations and unpredictable seizures, Hurdle and the Rockies also learned about perspective. Which, more than anything else, explains how Colorado was able to go from last place in the NL West to the World Series in the span of one season.

And come out of it insisting that none of it mattered.

“Baseball,” Hurdle said, “is a game. And I’ve learned that. I’ve embraced that, and I’ve tried to share that with my players. Let’s keep it a game. And let’s not take the end result and wear it like an anchor around our neck afterward.”

It wasn’t always that way for Hurdle, of course. As a player, he confesses, he was a “quick-fix guy” who wanted results immediately. And the Rockies, under General Manager Dan O’Dowd, were no different. After finishing 82-80 in 2000, O’Dowd’s first season as GM, Colorado went for the quick fix too, redirecting money from its player-development budget and committing more than $170 million to free-agent pitchers Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle.

The signings proved a disaster. Rather than getting the Rockies over the hump, they sent the franchise careening downhill through six consecutive losing seasons -- the last 4 1/2 under Hurdle.

Midway through the slide, which would end with consecutive last-place finishes, the man who once lived and died with every ball and strike abruptly left the team to be with his daughter, who was experiencing unexplained seizures. The seizures, coupled with Prader-Willi Syndrome -- a rare and complex genetic disorder Maddie was born with -- weren’t life-threatening, doctors explained, but there were no quick fixes. The Hurdles were in this for the long haul.

The Rockies already had made the same determination about their future, slashing payroll and reinvesting in player development.

Patience. Perspective.

Two traits the Rockies and their manager had once laughed at had suddenly become guiding principles for both. And when Hurdle finally returned to work he found a picture of Maddie on his desk framed by another “P” word. “Priorities,” read the frame, a gift from O’Dowd.

“I think Clint has changed quite a bit in the last couple of years,” said outfielder Matt Holliday, who has blossomed into a most-valuable-player candidate under Hurdle and is one of five Colorado starters produced by O’Dowd’s revitalized farm system.

“I think we’ve all learned just kind of how to really take it and make things simple, make them as easy as possible and really not make things more complicated than they need to be,” said Jeff Francis, another home-grown product, who will start Wednesday’s World Series opener after tying a franchise record with 17 wins this season.

Hurdle takes the compliments in stride, crediting the travel and not the traveler.

“My attitude, well hopefully I’ve gotten a little bit smarter as I’ve gotten older,” he said. “Through experience we all should grow and develop. Early in my career, I was in a hurry.

“[But] we’re prepared for our future through our paths. I’ve been given a lot of preparation for different situations.”

Including the situation he now finds himself in, one no manager in history has had to deal with. Hurdle’s Rockies open the first World Series in the franchise’s 15-year history riding a 10-game winning streak and having won 21 of their last 22 games since mid-September. They have also won their first seven postseason games, becoming the first team to do that in more than three decades. Yet, several times down the stretch they found themselves a loss, an out or a strike away from elimination.

Not once, however, did they see their manager flinch.

“He’s been as even-keel as you can get,” said reliever LaTroy Hawkins, who is playing for his sixth manager. “There were obvious times this year when we were down and he didn’t bring us all together and have a meeting. He just kind of kept us all confident. It felt like he knew we were going to turn this thing around.

“And now that we’re winning games, it’s not anything different. He’s just the same kind of guy he was when we were losing.”

Added former Rockies shortstop Walt Weiss, now a special assistant to O’Dowd: “He’s able to show up every day with the perspective of it being a new day regardless of what happened the day before. And regardless of what he had to deal with in his personal life.

“He’s been a rock through the whole thing.”

Not surprisingly, Colorado’s climb from fourth place in the NL West to the World Series began shortly after Hurdle was force-fed another dose of reality. Before a tough, extra-innings loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates, Hurdle got a call from Children’s Hospital outside Denver, where Kyle Blakeman, a 15-year-old cancer patient he had befriended, was about to die.

Blakeman’s mother told Hurdle her son wanted to see the manager one last time before he passed.

As the man and the boy talked after the game, Kyle mentioned that 64, the number he wore as a sophomore football player, had always brought him luck. So the next day Hurdle wrote the number atop the Rockies’ lineup card. And again the day after that, and the day after that.

Through 21 wins in 22 games. Through seven consecutive postseason wins. And No. 64 will be there again Wednesday night in Fenway Park.

“I mean, c’mon. I was in the hospital room with him just over a month ago in Kyle’s last days,” Hurdle said amid the clubhouse celebration, his smile fading and his eyes turning red and moist from something other than the champagne. “You talk about strength, you talk about belief and you talk about faith. The Blakemans have a whole bunch of it.”

And as he thought about that, suddenly even a World Series game doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

“Perspective,” Hurdle repeats. “Perspective is what needs to be important.”

--

kevin.baxter@latimes.com