Denver is a great baseball town just waiting for its Rockies to get it right

DENVER — The worst team in the American League met the bottom-dwellers of the American League this weekend at Coors Field.

By the looks of the crowds, you never would have known it.

And it was a reminder that early-season prognostications of an attendance crater for the Rockies may have been slightly off.

As John Elway once said in a commercial, “Turns out, I was wrong!”

In late April, the Coors Field crowds were down relative to the same point in previous seasons. But even as the Rockies settled at the foot of the NL West table and Colorado had one of its dampest springs in memory, people came.

“People will come,” trumpeted a sub-headline in the Rockies’ pregame notes Sunday. And they did — 36,000 for each game from June 23 through Saturday.

Sunday, in a 93-degree open-air sauna, that streak ended. But 31,789 came through the turnstiles to watch a Rockies team staring up at the entire National League and a punchless A’s lineup with less power than an Amish village.

That meant a robust weekend average of 38,045. And A’s fans were few and far between, so you can’t attribute the turnout to a surfeit of transplants.

Sure, Coors Field is a destination. A warm summer’s night at the LoDo ballyard is embedded in Colorado’s summer DNA. But there are plenty of other places to grab some drinks, meet friends, take kids to the playground or sit outside and enjoy the balmy air.

Because ultimately, it’s baseball. And that, too, is in Denver’s DNA.

The Athletics’ visit this weekend serves as a reminder that in the late 1970s, they could have been Denver’s team. Oilman Marvin Davis had an agreement to buy the A’s from the infamous Charles O. Finley and relocate the team to Colorado. Then, as now, the A’s had a foot out the door after napalming their own fan support.

But ultimately, the team stayed. Eventually, it prospered. Denver waited over a dozen years before the Rockies gained approval from National League owners in 1991. By then, anticipation was thick enough to cut with a steak knife. Generations of waiting, of relocation possibilities and even a proposed third major league — the Continental League — finally got Colorado across the plate in 1993.

While on-field success eluded the Rockies, support has almost always been boundless. So, drawing over 38,000 a game for a series between the worst of each league isn’t necessarily newsworthy.

It’s just a reminder that while Coors Field provides good times, the baseball still draws, too. A beautiful ballpark in the perfect spot.

And it — and its paying customers — can only continue waiting for the team Denver’s support deserves.

MEANWHILE, ON THE FIELD …

Colorado’s 2-0 win Sunday averted the ignominy of being swept by a team with the second-worst record after 107 games in the last 60 years.

Rockies reliever Ty Beach — receiving just his second start of the season — lasted through the fifth inning with an efficient, 52-pitch outing. Limiting Oakland batters to just 2.89 pitches per plate appearance, Blach faced just two at-bats of at least five pitches.

Third baseman Ryan McMahon drove home both Rockies runs with a third-inning single and a fifth-inning double, scoring catcher Austin Wynns and shortstop Ezequiel Tovar, respectively.

In advance of the trade deadline, reliever Daniel Bard also bounced back from his blown save in Washington last Wednesday with a scoreless eighth-inning appearance. But that didn’t mean he avoided suspense. After walking leadoff batter Tony Kemp, Bard caught Zack Gelof looking before Brent Rooker sent a slider 409 feet to the warning track that Nolan Jones nabbed. Kemp was subsequently caught stealing second when he came off the bag as Tovar applied the tag, ending the threat.

Bud Black lifted Jones in the ninth inning. Jones suffered some cramping while at the plate in the bottom of the eighth. Black said the move was precautionary.

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