Sports

Short piece I wrote for the TEN|10 Group's 10 Spot digging through the Colorado Rockies media guide and my own memory for things some fans don't know about their Colorado Rockies.

When I launched InsideTheRockies.com with Tracy Ringolsby and Jack Etkin a little over a year ago after the paper closed, our primary goal was to stay relevant. We hadn't considered the possibility we might actually create the very forum that was lacking in the city: honest, intelligent conversation about baseball.

The Minnesota Twins' signing of Joe Mauer completes Major League Baseball's journey back from the brink of contraction. Baseball is starting to grumble about realignment, which is long overdue for a sport that has one division with six teams and another with four. But ideas being bandied about like a dynamic realignment that can change from year to year based on teams' expectations or wishes, are even more ridiculous than the league's attempt to contract nearly a decade ago.

Like other great baseball movies few have seen -- Pastime, Long Gone and, to a lesser extent because of its improbable ending, Talent for the Game -- Sugar finds an aspect of the game few understand or possibly even know about, in this case the development of players in baseball academies owned by Major League Baseball in the Dominican Republic, a country where a disproportionate number of childhood dreams involve playing baseball in the United States. This is the story of what happens to those who either don't make it all the way or decide along the way that the dream belongs to someone else.

The line between banned substances and approved substances is very thin. How a player bulks up or what he takes to recover more quickly after a game is less important than that he does it all. To put it another way: going back more than a decade, andro was OK until it wasn't OK. But the net result was the same: Mark McGwire, once a skinny kid with a big hole in his swing and frequent knee injuries got big enough and stayed healthy long enough to break the single-season home run record and finish his career with 583 home runs, which at the time he retired that was a no-brainer number for the Hall of Fame. What if he had accomplished the same thing -- bulking up and staying healthy -- with totally approved and legal substances? Some players have actually done that. Even if the player remains untainted, the numbers for the era have been skewed.

Never thought Mike Shanahan would be out of a job before me, but, well, here you go. On the bright side, it looks like the job market's opening up quite a bit if you have any experience as an NFL head coach.