Catch The Fourth Place Rockies

By Nick McCann

On Thursday afternoon, after the Padres continued their downward spiral into becoming exactly what they are by losing to the Braves, my first college roommate, Will, emailed me about the up coming Rockies series with a subject line that read The Battle for Who Could Care Less. This was funny for two reasons (A) he has stated many times since we lived together that the thing he remembers most about me was coming back into our dorm room to find me sitting in the dark listening to Ben Folds Five’s second album Forever and Ever Amen (his chosen subject title is the third best song on that record) and (B) because he lives in Denver now and thinks that he can pass for being a real baseball fan.

I know for a fact that Will doesn’t give a shit about the game. I remember him saying countless times, from his soccer loving worldview, that Baseball was too slow for him. People who need sports to have speed, high scores, violence, and or stupid little red and yellow cards, are the same people who need movies to be in color, rock n roll to be “good” again, and politicians who are the “real” thing. Our grandparents had the golden years, and our parents fucked it all up. Let’s just wait to die together, and let the boys of summer remind us that hope is gone.

I don’t think the series this weekend will change much for either team. The Rockies have a bright future and the Padres don’t know what their future will be. In the present, both teams are near each other in the standings, and probably have no prayer of catching the Diamondbacks. That said, we can either watch the Padres literally catch the Rockies this weekend, or we can get really drunk on Coors light while they don't.

My old roommate moved to Colorado last spring and obviously got caught up in the hysteria of going all the way to the World Series. This shouldn’t be surprising to me because during our first week of school, he burst into our room and showed me a tattoo he had just gotten. I knew he was going to do it because everybody else was getting them. He pulled off his shirt and showed me his left shoulder that had a fresh bloody image of a cat’s game of tic tack toe on it. When I asked him why he did it, he answered, “Who cares? It’s early in the semester!”