With this home run swing, the wise Ryan Spilborghs reminded us that baseball is nothing more than a collection of fleeting moments.  Permanence in the game is nothing more than record of these brief moments and their numeric representations.  So perhaps this swing was also Spilly’s subtle way of warning us that his beard was just a temporary moment of wonder and beauty like everything else.  Within days of being named Rockiescast’s inaugural Beard of the Month, Spilly’s glorious beard was gradually trimmed into oblivion.  Rockiescast has gone through a lot of the stages of grief since then, but it’s time to take Spilly’s message to heart.  There is no purpose in moping over the end of a fleeting moment of glory.  Let us instead recall fondly that special moment in history when humanity was graced with Ryan Spilborghs’ manbeard.  That beard could hit!

Gather ‘round kids and let me tell you a tale of an extraordinary man named Victor. What makes Victor so extraordinary? Well you see kids, Victor has the ability to keep getting work as a pitcher even though he can’t pitch. I can’t pitch. Can you? I didn’t think so. Neither can Victor, but he is getting paid to pitch anyway and I am stuck here trying desperately to figure out how he does it.

The fact that Victor can’t pitch does not mean he hasn’t been able to produce some astonishing numbers throughout his career. He has pitched 706 1/3 innings in the major leagues. In that time, Victor has walked 404 batters, hit 63 more and thrown 46 wild pitches. That comes to more than 5 walks per 9 innings, a hit batter once every 11 innings, and a wild pitch every 15 innings. The term “Control Issues” does not even come close to describing this guy’s problem on the mound. He is a danger to batters, catchers, and umpires any time he takes the mound. So who keeps giving this guy a job?

The Colorado Springs Sky Sox have sent Victor Zambrano to the mound 5 times this season. His record currently stands at 0-4, but don’t let that no decision fool you. He pitched poorly enough to earn the loss in that one too. I guess he just got lucky. In his 5 starts, he has accrued an ERA of 10.23. In just 22 innings, he has given up 36 hits and 22 walks. In his best outing of the year, he somehow managed to only give up 3 earned runs despite allowing 7 hits and walking 6 in 4 2/3 innings.

Maybe the Sky Sox can move Zambrano to the bullpen to be a lefty specialist. After all, lefties are ONLY hitting .340 against him. That’s terrible compared to the .419 average right-handed hitters are batting against him. If Tom Runnells, Sky Sox Manager, would only give me a chance to put on a uniform, I bet I can be as ineffective as this guy for a fraction of the salary. So why does the organization continue wasting their time and money on Victor Zambrano? They realize he’s not Carlos, right?

As the first month of the regular season draws to a close, let’s take a look back at the four men whose baseball and grooming habits have caught Rockiescast’s lustful eye.  But you know…it’s a platonic lustful, like frat brothers.

3/31-4/6 

The Man: Jason LaRue, C, St. Louis Cardinals

The Crush: There wasn’t a lot to be happy about with the Rockies performance in the first week of the season, so we distracted ourselves with some eye-candy outside the organization.  Mr. LaRue caught our attention pretty quickly when the Rockies opened the season in St. Louis.  Rockiescast is a sucker for a man with muttonchops or a well-executed fu man chu, so the room got a few degrees hotter when we noticed LaRue has both.  Too bad he can’t hit.

4/7-4/13 

The Man: Matthew Thomas Holliday, LF, Colorado Rockies

The Crush: After struggling through the first week of the season, MTH woke up his bat with one handsome home run swing on the season’s first Sunday afternoon.  Over the next 6 games, Holliday collected 12 hits, drove in 11 runs, and dropped two more bombs.  It was good enough to raise his average by .158.  That’s an improvement more than double Jason LaRue’s average!  Rockiescast’s prediction: get used to seeing this guy’s picture near the word “mancrush” on this site.  He could be The Manone.

4/15-4/20

The Man: Clint Barmes, 2B-SS, Colorado Rockies

The Crush: Rockiescast has a soft spot for Clint Barmes.  We make no secrets about that.  But it didn’t take our predisposition to get us all fired up for Barmes this week.  No, his 8-for-25, 4-double week at the plate did that for us.  He even got a chance to show off his stamina, playing the entirety of the Rockies’ 22-inning victory in San Diego.  Not bad for a guy who was supposed to be a reserve infielder this year.

4/21-4/27

The Man: Aaron Cook, SP, Colorado Rockies

The Crush: As the Rockies run-production woes persisted, Aaron Cook carried the team on his back for 7 innings during his lone start this week.  He lasted 8 innings total, allowing 2 earned runs on 4 hits.  At one point, the Cookie Monster retired 16 straight batters.  He also went 2-for-3 at the plate, making him a better hitterthan Jason LaRue.  Based on the way Rockiescast blushes whenever a Cook sinker shatters an opponent’s bat, we have a feeling you’ll see this handsome red goateeon the mancrush list pretty often this year.

Maybe I’m becoming a cranky, old man ahead of schedule. Maybe watching so many games at Coors Field has made me hypersensitive to how the ball plays at newer ballparks. Maybe I just grew up at a time when crummy ballparks were readily identifiable by patchy AstroTurf and circular shape. Whatever the cause, I’ve got a beef with some of the ballparks that have been churned out over the last 12 years or so. None of these stadia draw my ire more than Minute Maid Park, home of the Houston Astros and host to the Rockies this last weekend.

The new generation of ballparks started innocently enough in Baltimore, Cleveland, then Denver with ballparks intended to combine state-of-the-art convenience for players and fans with an old-timey baseball look that blended into the park’s neighborhood. The idea caught on, and Major League cities everywhere were adopting variations on the concept. By the turn of the millenium, some of the newest parks looked like little Disney Worlds with a lot of red brick and steel. In the middle of it all somewhere, each of these ballparks had a bandbox of a baseball field. If the Tilt-A-Whirl doesn’t bring in the crowds, surely the home run ball will! (I’m aware of the irony of this coming from a Rockies fan, but the issue at Coors is physics rather than intent.)

Some of the newest parks were also built as retractable domes, which means the little brick and steel Disney World was crammed into a warehouse. In most of these domes, it’s immediately clear that field shape was an afterthought in the design. The outfield walls jut out at bizarre angles to accommodate the warehouse structures and outfield pavilions and big hot tubs and playground slides for the team mascot. There are even overhangs where home run territory extends over the outfield. Inevitably, there will be yellow lines painted on or immediately in front of some walls that will make it unreasonably difficult for umpires to make accurate calls.

Minute Maid Field seems to be the poster structure for everything that’s wrong with this generation of retractable domes. It’s got the bizarre angles, the impossible home run calls, a tiny left field porch, and even a flagpole in center field! Don’t worry though, no center fielders are going to run blindly into the flagpole on the field, because they’ll tear their ACLs to shreds before they get there.

The knee (and sometimes ankle) injuries are courtesy of Tal’s Hill, a 10-degree grass slope that awkwardly rests at the base of the wall in dead center. You might recall the Rockies trip to Houston last season, where former Astro Willy Taveras was injured making a play on Tal’s Hill. The problem with the hill is that it demands that oncoming fielders immediately adjust to a 10-degree change to the flat plane they’ve been on all game. But the center fielder already has enough to worry about with tracking the fly ball and likely running. It’s a torqued knee and a face full of grass waiting to happen.

For the record: I definitely support the concept of a sloped approach to the wall in the outfield, but it’s executed poorly in Houston. They need a gradual slope to give the fielder time to adjust. If done right (and sans flagpole), it could be goodbye re-constructive surgery, hello web gem!

I also don’t like the hokey names that are quickly replacing baseball terminology at Minute Maid Park. Part of center field has been replaced with a topographical feature with a dude’s name. A home run to left field (which seem to happen at least every other inning) usually lands in the Crawford Boxes that sit in what should probably be more left field. It’s just a matter of time before the right-center gap is known only as Pecos Valley. The only thing that could be cornier is if they put a fake train on top of a wall and ran it down a short track after every Astros home run. Oh right, they’ve already got that covered.

The point is that it’s time we started referring to the place as Enron Field again. The parallels are too obvious to pass up this opportunity. On face, things look pretty solid and attractive. Look how shiny and high budget everything is: these guys must know what they’re doing! But then you get a little deeper into things to find that it’s all poorly conceived and ill-equipped to carry out its primary function…

On second thought, maybe the Crawford Boxes can stay.

While searching online for some good reading about the Rockies and their 2008 quest towards Purple Rocktober Glory, I’ve come across several articles that talk about “Colorado’s Rocky Start” to the 2008 season.  I do believe that is the type of lame pun that would earn me a slap right across the face from Rockiescast co-host Ted Burke if I were to use it in his presence.  Honestly, he would be fully justified in doing so.  I often use the phrase “off to a rocky start” and it certainly fits the way things have gone thus far in this young season.  I may have even used it to describe the Rockies first two series of the year without realizing that I was treading dangerously close to the thin line that separates good humor from awful wordplay.  Once you capitalize that “R” and make it a pun on the team name, you’ve crossed that line into dull humor territory that should only be used when trying to be intentionally unfunny.  C’mon guys.

Poor humor aside, the incredible run made by the Rockies at the end of last season seems to have completely made everyone forget that this is not all that different than the start to the Rockies memorable 2007 National League Pennant winning season.  April was not kind to the team, as they finished the month with 10 wins and 16 losses.  I am sitting here perusing tonight’s (Monday) starting line-up as I await the start of the series opener against the Braves, so I decided to take a look to see how a few of our currently underachieving players fared early last season.

Taveras, Tulo & Hawpe (which I think would be an awesome name for a law firm) really picked things up the second month of the season last year.  The same goes for Francis on the mound.  While expectations were very high that the Rockies would come storming out of the gates this season, they are off to a slow start… again.  It is not time to panic, it is not time to think the end of last season was a fluke, and six games into the season is definitely not time to think the season is already lost.  For true, purple-blooded Rockies fans, it is time to show some resolve, support the team through the bad times early and be ready to start celebrating some victories when the bats come to life and the pitching staff settles into their routine.  Also, you should see a doctor about that purple blood.  That’s probably not healthy.