How the pitch clock would change the greatest moments in MLB history
Kirk Gibson’s at-bat in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, from the moment he hobbles out of the dugout to Vin Scully exclaiming, “She is gone!” as the ball sails into the right-field bleachers, lasts 6 minutes and 48 seconds.
Not that anyone was putting a timer on it 35 years ago.
Gibson, fighting an injured left hamstring and ailing right knee, delivered perhaps the most dramatic home run in World Series history with his game-winning pinch-hit blast off Dennis Eckersley, slowly circling the bases with his iconic celebration.
But how would it and other famous moments packed with postseason drama have played out now that we will be timing every pitch with the new pitch clock rules coming to MLB in 2023?
The new rules are intended to speed up the game and create a more constant pace of action. With no runners on base, pitchers will have 15 seconds to throw a pitch after receiving the ball from the catcher. With runners on base, the timer moves to 20 seconds. Pitchers will also be allowed only two “disengagements” per plate appearance (pickoff attempts or stepping off the rubber). These changes had a significant effect in the minors, shortening games by 25 minutes, and having attended a few minor league games myself in 2022, the quicker pace was certainly noticeable and is a necessary change for the game.
These changes will also require major adjustments for major league pitchers who are used to stalking behind the mound to regroup after every pitch, and hitters who step out and adjust their batting gloves after every foul ball. I thought of the potential impact of the pitch clock while watching the Gibson game this winter and realized how slowly that moment builds to its climax — Gibson on his two bad legs, trying to collect himself between pitches and somehow deliver the impossible.
Starting with Gibson’s epic home run, let’s take a look back at a few moments from baseball history and consider how a pitch clock might have changed them.
1988 World Series: Gibson homers off Eckersley
The dramatic stage of this moment begins as soon as Gibson steps out of the dugout to pinch hit and Vin Scully pronounces “And look who’s coming up” as Dodgers fans rise to their feet. It concludes when the eighth pitch from Eckersley lands in the right-field bleachers and Scully exclaims, “She is gone!”
The moment unfolds over the nerves of postseason baseball, over the hope of unexpected elation. Gibson takes his practice swings in the on-deck circle to loosen up as Eckersley paws at the pitching rubber and A’s manager Tony La Russa paces in front of the bench. Gibson limps to the plate, digs a foothold, steps back out of the box to take another swing and adjusts his helmet, finally ready. It’s 1 minute and 17 seconds from the first sighting of Gibson until Eckersley goes into his stretch for the first pitch, with the A’s leading the Dodgers 4-3 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and Mike Davis on first base.
During the course of the at-bat, Eckersley would throw four times to first base and his catcher Ron Hassey would also try a back-pick on Davis on the fourth pitch. Gibson also fouled off four pitches, including a little dribbler down the first-base line. Finally, on the eighth pitch of the at-bat, nearly seven minutes after he first took the ball, Eckersley tried to beat Gibson with a backdoor slider. Gibson swings. And the rest is history.
Let’s clock the elapsed time from when Eckersley receives the ball until he starts his motion between each pitch to see what would — and wouldn’t — be allowable with baseball’s new 2023 rules.
Pitch No. 1: It takes 1:17 from the time Gibson steps out of the dugout until Eckersley begins his delivery. Foul ball.
Of note here: The rules set a 30-second timer between batters, so Gibson’s measured approach to getting ready would be a violation of the rules, although we’ll have see what kind of leniency is given to pinch-hitters, especially ones who aren’t already on the on-deck circle, as was the case with Gibson.
Pickoff throw to first base: 25.3 seconds.
Gibson stepped out of the box after the foul ball. Under the new rules, batters must be in the batter’s box and ready to hit with at least eight seconds on the timer. They are allowed one timeout per plate appearance.
Pitch No. 2: 18.5 seconds after Eckersley got the ball back from the first baseman. Foul ball.
Gibson had stepped out again, but this pitch got in just under the clock.
Pickoff throw to first base: 19.5 seconds.
Gibson steps out again, Eckersley throws to first base.
Pickoff throw to first base: 18.9 seconds
A third disengagement. Violation! This will be allowed if the pickoff is successful; otherwise, it will be considered a balk.
Pitch No. 3: 12.4 seconds. Foul ball
The little dribbler down the first-base line.”It had to be an effort to run that far,” Scully declares as Gibson walks back to retrieve his bat, informing us that Gibson was too banged up to even come on the field for pregame introductions.
Pitch No. 4: 34.4 seconds. Ball.
On the broadcast, we don’t see exactly when Eckersley gets a new ball from the umpire, but I estimate 34-35 seconds between pitches, as Eckersley waits for Gibson to hobble back to the batter’s box and get ready. Hassey attempts the back-pick on this pitch.
Pitch No. 5: 21.3 seconds. Foul ball.
Most of the delays here are coming from Gibson, not Eckersley. A reminder that the timer doesn’t affect just the pitchers.
Pitch No. 6: 23.2 seconds. Ball.
Davis was running on the previous pitch, so there’s a slight delay as he returns to first base and Gibson steps out to shake his left leg, “making it quiver like a horse,” as Scully tells us.
Throw to first base: 17.5 seconds.
Another violation! A fourth disengagement.
Pitch No. 7: 17.7 seconds. Ball.
Davis steals second base. Hassey goes out to the mound, which does not count as a disengagement (if a team has used up all five of its mound visits prior to the ninth inning, it will be allowed a sixth visit).
Pitch No. 8: 1:03.6 seconds. Home run.
That’s over a minute between pitches thanks to the Hassey-Eckersley meeting. Hassey goes back and squats down, and then Gibson again steps out of the box. It’s 28 seconds from the time Hassey squats until Eckersley throws his pitch.
The 2023 rules takeaway: So let’s see here, under 2023 rules: Multiple clock violations … Gibson steps out too many times … Eckersley throws over to first base too many times. While there is no doubt that the game does need to speed up, there will also understandably be calls to eliminate the pitch clock for the postseason.
Indeed, agent Scott Boras already made that declaration earlier this winter. “In the postseason, there clearly should be no pitch clock,” he told reporters. “It’s the moment, the big moment. They need to reflect, they need more time, it’s a different scenario than the regular season, and we do not want their performances rushed.”
Let’s go to a more recent moment. The signature home run of the 2022 postseason was Harper’s go-ahead blast in the eighth inning of Game 5 of the NLCS to send the Philadelphia Phillies to the World Series. The fans had been electric and loud all day despite a light drizzle that fell throughout most of the game, knowing a win would mean clinching the pennant in Philadelphia and a loss would send the series back to San Diego. Harper had already hit four home runs in the postseason, and it just felt like something big was going to happen. Even John Smoltz, calling the game, sensed it: “You don’t think when Bryce Harper signed that megadeal he had visions of having a chance to send his team to the World Series?”
Pitch No. 1: 1:17. Swing and a miss.
With a runner on base and the Phillies down 3-2, Harper takes his time, wiping down his bat in the on-deck circle. Adjusts his batting gloves. A couple swipes of dirt. Steps out. Looks out at Suarez. More dirt. Suarez steps off. More dirt. Finally, Harper taps the plate with his bat and he’s ready. It took him longer than 30 seconds.
Pitch No. 2: 25.9 seconds. Ball.
Pitch No. 3: 22.7 seconds. Foul ball.
Pitch No. 4: 23.1 seconds. Foul ball.
Pitch No. 5: 25.5 seconds. Foul ball.
Pitch No. 6: 28.9 seconds. Ball.
Pitch No. 7: 23.1 seconds. Home run.
Seven pitches. None delivered within the 20-second rule or even particularly close to within 20 seconds before Harper hits his NLCS-winning home run.
The 2023 rules takeaway: How does this play out in 2023, without Harper adjusting his gloves and Suarez taking his very deep breaths between every pitch?
Watching Harper take his time to wipe his bat in the rain, tap the plate and adjust his batting gloves is a good example of why the pitch clock isn’t just about pitchers. In fact, it’s possible the biggest adjustments here will have to come from batters. MLB reported that the average fastball velocity in the minors remained the same in 2022 as in 2021 — 93.0 mph — so perhaps pitcher velocity won’t be affected as some have surmised (we’ll see about command).
Hitters who constantly step out to adjust their batting gloves and contemplate the next pitch will have to speed up their approach.
The Baseball Savant website tracks a number for each pitcher called pitch tempo, which is the time between pitches. It’s not exactly the same thing as a pitch timer as it measures the overall time between pitch releases. We can subtract about six seconds from that number to use as a proxy for the pitch timer.
They also have pitch tempo listed for 378 batters. The three slowest with the bases empty in 2022 were Christian Vazquez, J.D. Martinez and Mark Canha. Harper, Pete Alonso and Kyle Tucker are three stars near the bottom. Overall, however, only nine batters averaged 15 seconds or more between pitches using our adjusted methodology. With runners on base, it’s worth noting that four of the eight slowest were Mets: Jeff McNeil, Brandon Nimmo, Alonso and Canha.
2001 World Series: Arizona Diamondbacks rally against Mariano Rivera
The most dominant reliever of all time, Rivera, was closing out what would have been the New York Yankees‘ fifth World Series title in six years in the bottom of the ninth in 2001, holding a 2-1 lead over the Diamondbacks. I won’t go through every pitch, but it’s clear Rivera was not the reason the Yankees of that era — or, really, the Yankees of the past three decades — were notorious for long games.
The entire two-run rally for the Diamondbacks took just under 10 minutes from Rivera’s first pitch to Mark Grace to the moment Luis Gonzalez’s blooper dropped just beyond the infield dirt. Rivera threw 14 pitches and faced six different batters, but there were also two pinch-runners, one pinch-hitter, two conferences at the mound and one quick visit by the trainer after Derek Jeter got tangled up at second base on Rivera’s wide throw on a sacrifice bunt.
Rivera worked very quickly. When he faced Tony Womack with two runners on, his times between pitches were 13.3 seconds, 12.4, 13.5 and 18.7. After Gonzalez fouled off the first pitch from Rivera, he dug in the batter’s box and then stepped out, leaving 29.7 seconds between pitches. I guess he picked the right pitch to think about, and we can only wonder what the result would have been had he not been able to take that much time to collect himself mid-at-bat.
The 2023 rules takeaway: Watching this inning, Rivera looks like Michael Phelps compared to most of today’s relievers, who pitch with the urgency of the old guy swimming laps at the YMCA. So maybe there is hope for today’s relievers: If the greatest closer of all time can pitch fast, why can’t even the slowest workers in today’s game?
Speaking of which, I’m going to pick on Jansen, one of the game’s current notorious slow workers. Going back to Baseball Savant’s pitch tempo: Jansen’s tempo with the bases empty in 2022 was 25.8 seconds, which ranked 397th out of 399 pitchers listed. His tempo with runners on base was 31.4 seconds — slowest of all. Take six seconds off those numbers and we get 19.8 and 25.4 seconds — still well above the allotted times of 15 and 20 seconds.
Let’s examine the ninth inning of Game 4 of the 2020 World Series, which ended with a wild Brett Phillips walk-off single that scored two runs for the Rays with the help of a couple of Dodgers miscues. Jansen would face five batters and throw 21 pitches — a half-inning (or two outs, actually) that would last 14 minutes and 38 seconds until Randy Arozarena stumbled home with the winning run.
The time between pitches, starting with the second pitch to Yoshi Tsutsugo:
Pitch No. 2: 17.4 seconds. Ball.
Pitch No. 3: 21.3 seconds. Foul ball.
Pitch No. 4: 22.1 seconds. Swinging strike.
Pitch No. 5: 21.5 seconds. Swinging strike.
Tsutsugo strikes out, and Kevin Kiermaier comes up.
Pitch No. 6: 31.4 seconds. Base hit.
Kiermaier was in the box at a reasonable 21 seconds after Tsutsugo’s strikeout, no delays here to adjust his batting gloves or wipe extra pine tar on the bat. Joey Wendle‘s at-bat begins with Kiermaier on first.
Throw to first: 30.8 seconds.
Pitch No. 7: 22.5 seconds. Ball.
Throw to first: 21.4 seconds.
Pitch No. 8: 18.3 seconds. Foul ball.
Pitch No. 9: 28.5 seconds. Ball.
Pitch No. 10: 25.0 seconds. Lineout to left.
Arozarena steps in, and the Dodgers hold a meeting at the mound with the pitching coach.
Pitch No. 11: 1 minute, 19 seconds. Strike.
Jansen steps off: 18.8 seconds.
Pitch No. 12: 15.1 seconds. Ball.
Throw to first: 23.6 seconds.
Pitch No. 13: 16.9 seconds. Foul ball.
Pitch No. 14: 33.4 seconds. Ball.
Pitch No. 15: 28.4 seconds. Ball.
Pitch No. 16: 26.0 seconds. Foul ball.
Pitch No. 17: 35.5 seconds. Ball four.
Following Arozarena’s walk, Phillips comes up with runners on first and second.
Pitch No. 18: 55.8 seconds. Ball.
Phillips and Jansen took a lot longer to get ready compared to Kiermaier and Wendle (it appeared it was mostly Jansen, who might have tossed out one ball to get a different one).
Pitch No. 19: 19.1 seconds. Strike.
Pitch No. 20: 38.3 seconds. Strike.
Pitch No. 21: 26.9 seconds. Base hit.
The 2023 rules takeaway: Most of these delays were on Jansen. He often walks behind the rubber after getting the return throw from the catcher and loves to hold the ball before delivering the pitch. He has since added that goofy little hip jerk he does that delays things even further. Foul balls certainly slow things down — and there are more foul balls than ever — but Jansen’s slow beat is a prime example of what MLB is trying to fix.
1978 World Series: Bob Welch fans Reggie Jackson
OK, let’s do one more — a reminder that even decades ago, when the game was generally pitched at a quicker pace, there were still moments when time slowed down.
Welch, the Dodgers’ 21-year-old rookie, faced Mr. October in the bottom of the ninth with two runners on and two outs in Game 2. In a nine-pitch battle for the ages, Welch threw one 100 mph fastball after another before finally striking out Jackson.
The timer:
Pitch No. 1: 16.1 seconds. Swinging strike. (We don’t see the entire sequence of Jackson stepping into the box.)
Pitch No. 2: 24.7 seconds. Ball.
Jackson gets knocked down and takes time to regroup.
Pitch No. 3: 37.0 seconds. Foul ball.
Pitch No. 4: 36.2 seconds. Foul ball.
Pitch No. 5: 22.5 seconds. Foul ball.
Pitch No. 6: 30.9 seconds. Ball.
Pitch No. 7: 32.6 seconds. Foul ball.
Pitch No. 8: 29.0 seconds. Ball.
Pitch No. 9: Swinging strike.
Jackson, wiping his brow between pitches, took swings so mighty he nearly twisted himself into the ground. One fastball after another, Jackson certainly was not interested in hitting a puny little single. Jackson would smash his bat in the dugout in frustration. “The kid beat me,” he said after the game.
The 2023 rules takeaway: Most of the delays here came from Jackson stepping out of the box to gear up for another Herculean swing. Even though this at-bat came more than four decades ago, it signifies much of what big postseason moments are about in today’s game. You have the home run-hitting slugger at the plate taking a big swing against a power pitcher’s best 100 mph heater. And then he steps out, regroups and heads back in to do it at all again. We will soon find out how different that dramatic sequence really feels with a clock dictating the pace.
Roger Angell once wrote, “Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.” This is true: It’s the game without a clock. Except, as Bill James has pointed out, early baseball did have a clock. In the first half of the 20th century, before lights and night games became de rigueur, games started in the late afternoon to accommodate workers and had to be played at a brisk pace to finish before nightfall. The sun was the clock. Now we have an official one.
After watching all of these classic moments again, I do feel the pitch clock is needed. For one thing: Many of these playoff moments now happen at the end of games that are approaching four hours in length and nearing midnight on the East Coast. We can all agree that speeding up games in the middle of a long regular season will be a positive. Even the players, some of whom will initially complain about the adjustments they need to make, will come around and appreciate the faster pace. Yet, it’s hard to deny how the drama builds throughout the rally or the one critical at-bat, the pitcher trying to breathe.
Now we just have to figure out what the ruling will be when Edwin Diaz is facing Julio Rodriguez in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the 2023 World Series with the Citi Field crowd screaming so loud that Diaz can’t hear the PitchCom device as the clock is counting down, and he has to motion to his catcher while Rodriguez steps out for the second time right as the timer hits zero.
Sports
‘I could have never imagined that this would happen’: How a group of Korean harmonica players captivated the world
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Ryan S. Clark
For a specific generation of Koreans, playing the harmonica is a reminder of their youth and their home — whereas not playing the harmonica for decades reminds them of what they left behind to pursue something more.
This includes Donna Lee. Now that she’s 80 years old, Lee can look back on a life growing up in Seoul, where she played the harmonica as a child in music class. She immigrated to the United States, and that led her to Southern California. She found a place in Koreatown, near downtown Los Angeles, where she still lives to this day, and worked at a local hospital for nearly 30 years before retiring.
Retiring left her bored and wanting more. That drew her to the Koreatown Senior and Community Center of Los Angeles. The center offered Lee and many of her compatriots a chance to take classes and enjoy the life they worked so hard to create. Then, in 2023, Lee joined the center’s harmonica class, in which she and her classmates repeatedly practiced “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“We have a weekly practice that’s one or two hours,” Lee said. “We’ve done it almost every week and have played it so many times I can’t count.”
With Los Angeles having the largest Korean community in the nation, the class was asked to perform at various events throughout the area. In January, the Los Angeles Kings reached out to the KSCC and invited the harmonica class to perform in March as part of the team’s Korean heritage night.
The response they received was so strong that they were invited to perform the national anthem before Game 1 of the Kings’ first-round Western Conference series against the Edmonton Oilers on April 21. Lee and 12 of her classmates donning hanbok — which is traditional Korean clothing — performed the national anthem and immediately went viral in a game the Kings won.
🎶Harmonicas heard ’round the world 🎶
📲 https://t.co/GBuBWqCo9w#GoKingsGo pic.twitter.com/EobOzy8HKi
— x – LA Kings (@LAKings) April 22, 2025
The performance was so popular that it led to the group being invited to perform at Game 2, which not only saw them gain more fans, but the Kings also won to take a 2-0 series lead. Since then? They’ve turned into a sensation that has not only caught the attention of the hockey world and Southern California, but it’s even getting attention in South Korea.
“I could have never imagined that this would happen,” Lee said.
IN THE SPAN of two years, the KSCC’s harmonica class went from only playing the national anthem in a classroom to performing in front of 18,000 fans on heritage night.
That was already the experience of a lifetime. But to receive an invite to perform at a Stanley Cup playoff game? Not only once, but twice? And to have nearly everyone in the building sing with their performance, and have social media go into a frenzy, with fans asking that they return for every home game?
It’s the sort of encounter that goes well beyond hockey, treading into a place that is deeper and more meaningful for Kwan-Il Park, a retired political journalist in South Korea who is now the KSCC’s executive director.
“There hasn’t been that many chances where the Korean community and the mainstream community was able to come together in this way,” Park said through Sandra Choi, who serves as an interpreter and is also a volunteer at the KSCC. “The key point in this is that the harmonica is not an expensive instrument. It’s $15 or $20 and it’s an everyday instrument for everybody.”
Park said the fact that the class was able to perform the national anthem with an instrument that is so universal created a moment that saw them feel immersed in their culture, while also paying homage to a place they’ve now called home for many years.
“We’ve always been perceived to be outsiders, immigrants with cultural barriers and language barriers,” Park said. “You come here, work straight for 30 or 40 years. This time, we were able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder as a Korean American and not just as an immigrant and to perform in front of 20,000 people? I don’t even know what the right word is for that.”
Park said Koreans first began immigrating to the U.S. in 1903, with many coming to cities along the Pacific Ocean. After the Korean War in the 1950s, there would be a second wave that contributed to the current landscape in which nearly 2 million Koreans live in the U.S.
Although Chicago, New York City and Washington D.C. have sizable Korean communities, Los Angeles has the largest, with 17% of all people of Korean descent in America living there, according to the Pew Research Center.
But what makes playing the national anthem on a harmonica so special? It’s because of how the instrument ties a life they once knew with the one they came to build for themselves and future generations.
KSCC chairperson Yong-Sin Shin said a certain generation of children growing up in South Korea were introduced to the harmonica in second grade as part of music class. While those children had a chance to play for a few more years, many of them stopped playing after immigrating to the U.S.
For the group at the KSCC, the harmonica connected them to those times.
Choi said that for many older Koreans, playing the harmonica was a chance for them to relax, which was something that often wasn’t afforded to a group that spent many of their years working to take care of their families.
“We would find a harmonica in my house because my dad had one,” Choi said. “If he plays it, it somehow rings a soul of my childhood as a Korean American. Even though I’m not from Korea, it has kind of a tie to all of us with the tone and the songs that we play on it.”
Shin said the KSCC was founded with the intent that older generations of Koreans could find community while providing them classes to fulfill them in their later years.
At first, the KSCC offered five classes per week. Since then, the center has expanded its offerings to 47 classes every Monday through Friday. Shin said the center attracts nearly 1,500 people per week.
Those classes range from developing skills that can be used in daily life to subjects that are meant as a hobby. For example, the KSCC offers multiple classes for those interested in improving their oral and written skills in English. They also provide beginner- and intermediate-level classes for those who want to learn how to use a smartphone.
Yet the crown jewel of the KSCC curriculum? It might be the 11:10 a.m. Wednesday harmonica class that lasts for 50 minutes.
Shin said the harmonica class started in 2021. The class started off by practicing for weeks at a time before they felt comfortable performing in public. Shin said the class would perform at events such as Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving or Seollal, which is Korean Lunar New Year in February. The profile of the class began to grow when the group was invited to perform at Los Angeles City Hall in 2023.
“Our senior harmonica class performed in front of 100 people and everybody liked it,” Shin said. “So, we continued to perform at our events at the senior center and they got better and better, and we started to get more invitations to play the harmonica.”
THERE’S A POINT that Park, Shin and Choi, even speaking outside of her role as an interpreter, all get across when it comes to the performance of the harmonica class and the popularity it achieved in such a short window.
Nobody saw this coming.
“I have a child in high school, and she even showed me the clip because it was so viral,” Choi said. “She said, ‘Isn’t this where we volunteer?'”
Part of the reason for that surprise can be measured through social media. It’s not easy to find a video of the group’s first performance for the Kings, probably because it was a regular-season game.
Compare that to the playoffs, when the anthem was televised nationally in North America.
Granted, anthem singers are no strangers to attention. But when it’s around a dozen Korean senior citizens performing — with harmonicas? Something that distinctive was bound to attract attention inside and outside the sport.
And it did, resulting in the group being invited back for Game 2, but this time instead of wearing traditional Korean clothing, they were decked out in Kings jerseys — while also having even more expectations now that the masses knew what was coming.
Their performances have led to people posting comments on social media that range from “Oilers comeback bid was cool but you ain’t beating the Kings in the house that the Korean Harmonica Grannies built” to an Oilers fan asking, “Does anyone in the Edmonton Korean Community play Harmonica? We need to fight fire with fire here.”
“We were not nervous,” Lee said of herself and her classmates. “It was my first time going to the arena because of the performance. So many people were surprised, and we just enjoyed the wonderful arena. It was a big place with a lot of people. We thought the performance was good and we just did a lot of preparing and practicing for the national anthem.”
Lee said she had never watched a Kings game but made a point to stay for Game 1 and immediately became a fan. She said there were some members of the class who stayed and others who went home.
But now?
“We’re all L.A. Kings fans now!” she said with a laugh.
Lee and Park said they have heard from family and friends in South Korea about how their performance has made headlines there. This is another detail nobody saw coming, but it adds to the visibility of Korean culture.
The Kings joined the Lakers, Dodgers and Clippers in having a Korean heritage night. Both the Rams and Chargers have also promoted initiatives during Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Month.
It’s also coming at a time when more Korean food, film, music and television hold a place in the mainstream.
“We have K-pop, K-drama, K-food, K-beauty — and now we have K-seniors,” Lee said.
Thirty years ago, the New York Mets and Colorado Rockies opened Coors Field on April 26,1995 in a game that would embody the beauty (if you’re a hitter) and absurdity (if you’re a pitcher) of the ballpark, when they combined for 20 runs and 33 hits in an 11-9, 14-inning Colorado win. It was just the beginning of a baseball experience like no other.
Standing 5,280 feet above sea level in Denver’s LoDo neighborhood, the picturesque ballpark is one of the sport’s gems, constantly ranking near the top of MLB stadium rankings and keeping the Rockies’ attendance among the league’s highest regardless of the home team’s record.
“Since 1995 I’ve been at nearly 95% of the games played at Coors Field,” owner Dick Monfort told ESPN last week. “Of all those thousands of games, my fondest memories are of a sold-out ballpark on an 85-degree day with no humidity, a beautiful sunset, and 50,000 men, women and kids soaking in the timeless magic of iconic Coors Field.”
But for the pitchers who have taken the mound at the stadium over the past three decades, Coors Field is something else: a house of horrors.
‘S—, the whole time there was a horror story, man,” said Marvin Freeman, who started 41 games for the Rockies over the first two years of the ballpark. “We called it arena baseball. It was like a pinball machine up in there sometimes. Balls were flying out of there. And you just had to make sure when you did leave Colorado you maintained some sanity because it could be hard on your mentality.”
To commemorate the anniversary of a launching pad like no other, we asked those who have pitched or taken the field at a place where breaking balls don’t break and a mistake left over the plate can travel 500 feet into the mountain air to share their best (er, worst) Coors Field horror stories.
A big swing haunts you: ‘It’s all part of the Coors experience’
On May 28, 2016, Carlos Estevez was less than a month into his major league career when he entered in the eighth inning against the San Francisco Giants with a daunting task: facing a future Hall of Famer in a one-run game.
Before Buster Posey stepped into the batter’s box, Estevez’s Colorado coaches and teammates gave the reliever some advice on how to approach the situation.
“I remember throwing a fastball away,” Estevez recently recalled to ESPN. “He could crush pitches close to him. ‘Stay safe. Go away. He’s going to single to right field, worst-case scenario.’ I’m new. The new guy was showing up.”
When Posey connected on a 96 mph fastball on the outer half of the plate with a 2-0 count, it momentarily appeared to Estevez that following the advice had paid off.
“I go [points in the air like pitchers do for popups]. It was one of those. The ball goes out. I didn’t even look anywhere else. I just kept my face down,” Estevez said. “Oh my god. That was so bad. After that, never again — unless I knew the ball was right on top of me. Man, that was bad. I felt so bad. The older guys, of course, made so much fun of me with that. Like, bro, you don’t know where you’re pitching.”
0:28
Flashback: Buster Posey cranks his second 3-run HR of the game
On May 28, 2016, Giants catcher Buster Posey takes Carlos Estevez deep for his second three-run homer of the game at Coors Field.
If Estevez can take solace in anything from that day, it is that his experience mirrors that of pitchers throughout the sport — just ask Ubaldo Jiménez, who had a run of stardom for the Rockies until being traded in 2011. “We were like, you can never point up, you can never think it is a fly ball, because it’s probably going to go out.”
Jerry Dipoto, Rockies reliever (1997-2000) and current Mariners general manager: I saw some of the longest home runs that a human can possibly hit. At the height of Mark McGwire, I watched him literally hit one over the scoreboard, which, if you have a chance and you stand at home plate, look at the left-field scoreboard, the Coke bottle that used to run alongside the scoreboard. He hit it over the Coke bottle, into the parking lot, through the windshield of Jerry McMorris, our owner, which was awesome.
Andrés Galarraga and Mike Piazza hit home runs over the center-field fence, over the forest in the rock waterfall up there, and up into the concourse that has like a 20-foot opening, looks like something out of “Star Wars,” and they were both line-drive missiles that probably only stopped because they hit something out in the concourse.
Ryne Nelson, opposing pitcher: I haven’t pitched there a ton, but C.J. Cron hit a ball that felt like it was 10 feet off the ground the whole way and it left the yard. So I’m not sure if it would’ve been a home run everywhere, but it was one of the more impressive home runs that I’ve given up.
Dipoto: I can remember giving up a homer to Henry Rodriguez to left field, one year when he was at the height of hitting homers. It was like a broken-bat, end-of-the-bat, oppo, what I thought was just a floater. It wound up in the wheelchair section out there.
Jeremy Guthrie, Rockies starter (2012): I was facing the Oakland Athletics. And they hit at least two, maybe three, upper-deck home runs. I was not under the impression they weren’t going to go out. Seeing balls go further and further and fans boo louder and louder, though — it’s all part of the Coors experience.
Dipoto: They had a row of seats in the upper deck in right field that was like a ring around the upper-deck seats, and it was a mile above sea level. An absurd distance beyond home plate.
I remember I had a really difficult time through the years with Ray Lankford. And Jeff Reed was catching me one day and I’m trying to get fastballs by Ray Lankford and I can’t get anything past him. It’s foul ball, foul ball, it feels like a 10-pitch AB. And he comes walking out. And every day in spring training, in my catch game, I’d throw a changeup. I didn’t actually have one or throw it in a game. It was just something to try to get some feel. Reeder came to the mound and said, “Hey, what do you think about just throwing that changeup?” I said, “I’ve never done it in a game, Reeder.”
He said, “Yeah, if you’ve never done it in a game, he won’t be expecting it either.” So I threw a changeup, and I actually threw it for a strike, and he hit it above the purple seats. It wound up going a mile. Like literally going a mile.
Tyler Anderson, Rockies starter (2016-19) and current Angels pitcher: My rookie year when I was called up … I remember there was a runner on first and two outs, which usually you feel pretty safe.
[Evan Longoria] hit like a line drive that got past the second baseman, where normally you’re like, “All right, there’s runners on first and third now.” And it just like rolled all the way to the wall. He got a triple and the runner scored from first. And I remember thinking to myself, How the heck is that a triple? Obviously I was pretty young in my pitching career, but I pitched a lot in college and the minor leagues, and that was never a triple. That was crazy. I remembered that. And I always thought pitching in Coors Field, it doesn’t matter if there’s only a runner on first, you’re never safe. Two outs, runner on first sometimes could feel safe, but it’s never safe.
Freeman: I always liked to say that every bad game that I had at Coors Field was because of Coors Field, not me. I usually fall back on that. But I do remember one particular case where I made it into the ninth inning, my son was going to be born the next day, and I was actually on the mound thinking about pitching my first complete game.
I ended up giving up a home run to Hal Morris. He hit an opposite-field home run on me. And Ellis Burks, I thought he was going to jump the fence and bring it back, but he didn’t catch it. And then I end up getting knocked out of the game in the ninth inning, and we subsequently end up losing that game, and my son was born the next day. That’s really the only game that sticks out to me … you gotta try and survive the next one.
ERAs turn into a scary sight: ‘That place is a nightmare’
Late in the 2023 season, then-Minnesota Twins reliever Caleb Thielbar boarded the plane to Colorado with something treasured by pitchers everywhere — an ERA starting with a 2.
With the Twins trailing 6-4 in the series opener, Thielbar was summoned from the bullpen to face Rockies star Charlie Blackmon. Thielbar retired the Colorado outfielder and left the outing with his sub-3.00 ERA still intact.
But the next day, with the Twins ahead 14-0, Thielbar entered the game in the bottom of the seventh inning — and his ERA wasn’t so lucky that time.
“It was my last outing of the year and I gave up back-to-back homers,” Thielbar told ESPN earlier this month. “And it bumped my ERA up over 3.00. And just one of those things that makes you mad and it stuck with me for a little bit.
“I don’t understand how to pitch there. For some reason, the Rockies have always kind of gotten me — no matter home or away — so they really got me there. But that place is a nightmare.”
Even though the back-to-back home runs hit by Colorado’s Elehuris Montero and Sean Bouchard pushed Thielbar’s ERA from 2.67 to a season-ending 3.23 mark, you’ll have to excuse some other pitchers who might not feel too badly for someone whose Coors Field horror story only involves allowing two runs.
Guthrie: I don’t know that I had any good outing at Coors. I know my ERA was 9.50 [at Coors] and 3.67 on the road that year. I really did want to pitch well there. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. I went in with high hopes and a positive attitude. There aren’t as many people who go in with a good attitude as you hope. I really felt like the organization treated pitchers, and especially new pitchers, in a way where it’s almost inevitable you’re going to struggle. You need to change the way you prepare. You need to be aware of how your body is going to react at high altitude. Nothing felt different physically. I just pitched a lot worse.
Among the 223 pitchers with at least 40 innings at Coors, Guthrie’s 9.50 ERA is second worst, ahead of only Bryan Rekar, who posted a 10.16.
Walker Buehler, opposing pitcher: If you’re a starting pitcher and you normally go six, seven innings — going five innings there is some sort of accomplishment. I think honestly the toughest part from our side of it is not necessarily the home run, which a lot of people think it is. The field is so big. You give up a lot of hits you normally don’t give up.
On June 27, 2019, Buehler gave up 13 hits over 5⅔ innings at Coors, although the Dodgers won the game 12-8. Buehler gave up seven of the eight runs and his ERA rose from 2.96 to 3.43.
Honestly, it’s probably a top-five ballpark in baseball, but I just don’t think our game should be played at that kind of elevation. It legitimately changes the game. It’s just different. I don’t know if there’s some sort of f—ing dome vacuum technology thing we can get going there or what.
The scoreboard becomes a horror show: ‘Every game there is like a football game’
Sometimes it doesn’t matter who is on the mound at Coors Field, especially in the summer months when the days get warmer and the Rocky Mountain air gets even drier. An entire pitching staff can leave the ballpark with a battered ERA.
In fact, teams have averaged at least five runs per game at Coors Field in every season it has existed. Over that span, there were just three seasons since 1995 when the MLB average was 5.0 runs per game or more (1996, 1999 & 2000).
Even in the ballpark’s long history of scores that look like they belong in a football game, four-hour marathons of runners touching home plate and double-digit rallies, one series stands out from the crowd. Over four days on Father’s Day weekend of 2019, the Rockies and Padres combined to score 92 runs, setting a modern record for runs in a four-game series by surpassing a total set by the Philadelphia Phillies and Brooklyn Dodgers … in 1929.
“Every game was like 15 to 14 or something like that. We would take the lead and then they would take the lead and then they would take the lead back,” recalled Trevor Story, the Rockies’ shortstop from 2016 to 2021 and a current Red Sox infielder. “It was just back and forth the whole way. Every game of the series was this way, so it was just mentally exhausting. You felt like whoever hit last was going to win. I think we lost a series and it ended up, it was just kind of deflating because we put up all those runs. That series sticks out to me.”
The teams scored in double digits five times, six runs were the fewest for either team in any game, and the Padres’ team ERA jumped from 4.23 to 4.65 while the Rockies’ rose from 4.97 to 5.29.
“My god, that series against the Padres. PTSD still. Between both teams, we scored 92 runs in a four-game series. It was miserable,” Estevez said. “That series just ran through everyone. Everyone gave up runs. [Fernando] Tatis had an amazing series. I don’t know what he didn’t do. I mean, he didn’t pitch.”
While not every series is quite that extreme, almost anyone who has spent enough time at Coors Field has a similar story to tell.
Ryan Spilborghs, Rockies outfielder, 2005-11: One of my favorite memories of Coors Field was against the Cardinals. We were down 7-1 in the bottom of the ninth inning, and we ended up walking off the Cardinals. The best part of it was Tony La Russa. Threw his hat and broke his glasses. And so the next day, it was a Sunday and they didn’t have time to get his glasses fixed so you could see him. He got them taped. Looked like the Poindexter glasses. So we’re just loving it. We’re like, “Hey, we broke La Russa’s glasses.”
Bruce Bochy, opposing manager: We had a game in which Bob Tewksbury started great, six or seven good innings. I had to take him out when we were ahead 9-2, and Willie Blair went in and we lost 13-12.
Dan O’Dowd, Rockies general manager, 1999-2014: You’d give up five or six runs, and you’d be like — ah, no problem. You never felt like you were out of it.
Clint Hurdle, Colorado Rockies manager, 2002-09, and current hitting coach: It’s almost like when we were playing street basketball. You get your two teams together. Last bucket wins, right? That’s what I realized early on. But it was going to be a blessing and a curse because your position players actually started believing we’re never out of it.
Jack Corrigan, Rockies radio broadcaster: Even with the humidor and everything else, the outfield’s the biggest in baseball, the wind — I think sometimes that’s why it’s a great place to watch a game. The Rockies might be a bad team that particular year or whatever, but it might be a heck of a game.
Trevor Hoffman, opposing pitcher: Every game there is like a football game. The offense always has a chance. I cannot imagine playing 81 games a year like that.
The altitude goes to your head: ‘This is not baseball’
Jim Leyland took the job as Rockies manager in 1999 coming off a sustained run of success in Pittsburgh and Miami — and lasted only a year. Buck Showalter managed the opposing Diamondbacks in one of Leyland’s final games in Colorado, and after the game, Leyland told him he was finished. “He said, ‘I’m out of here. You can’t win here.’ He was done,” Showalter recalled over the weekend. “He said, ‘I love the game, I want to manage baseball. This is not baseball.'”
Near the end of that season, Leyland turned to then-first-year general manager Dan O’Dowd and said, “Do you have any f—ing idea what you’ve gotten yourself into?”
O’Dowd stayed with the organization through the 2014 season and was constantly racking his brain for ways to manage the unusual circumstances in Colorado.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, he says he would try the model that the Rays use: build around player development, and then, when young players are at their peak trade value, flip them for a big return. “I’d have waves and waves of depth — power arms, strike throwers and athletic guys.”
Showalter was heavily involved in the planning and building of another expansion team of that era, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and wonders how the pitcher-centric approach would work sustainably at Coors Field. If you were running the Rockies, he said, “You’d have to develop your own pitchers. You’d take pitchers in all 20 rounds. You’d have to be three layers deep.”
The longtime manager also noticed during his time competing against the Rockies that there was always some new idea on how to conquer Coors Field.
“It seems like everybody has had some magic potion [to deal with the elevation], but none of them worked,” Showalter said. “It wore on you physically to play games there.
“What they should do is put a 40-foot-high jai alai wall and play it off the fence, and use four outfielders.”
O’Dowd’s attempts to reinvent baseball at altitude were never that extreme, but he did oversee the deployment of the ballpark’s humidor in 2002, and looking back, he “almost wishes I hadn’t.” In some ways, it mitigated the home-field advantage that the Rockies had in the early days of the ballpark — and he believes that in order for the Rockies to have success, they have to thrive at home, because the inherent closer-to-sea-level or at-sea-level conditions in road games will always be a disadvantage for the team.
“We were looking for a way to normalize the game. … In hindsight, it would’ve been better to not have it.”
Bud Black, Rockies manager, 2017-present: Other managers, coaches come to me. I’m sure they came to Baylor. Leyland quit after one year. They say, “How do you do it? How can you hang in there?” I just know that when I was with the Padres and we’d come in, our hitters were like, “Yes!” Our pitchers were like, “Oh, s—.” You can see pitchers visibly rattled.
Freeman: It wasn’t just the Rockies. It was the visitors. Some of them guys that came in, they were coming up with mysterious injuries for three days when they came in for a series with the Rockies, man. I know for a fact some of my Braves buddies used to ask me all the time, “How do you guys survive mentally out here?” We’re like, “We just look forward to going on the road when it’s our time to pitch.”
Bochy: They had one of those smoke shops by the ballpark. I always said they put that there for the managers, to stop there and get something that would get them through the game.
It’s a different game — a totally different game. It’s a beautiful ballpark, with the architecture, the Rockpile, everything they have there. But it changed how you played the game. You had to manage a little bit different, stay with your starting pitchers a little longer because you could really tear up your bullpen over a series.
LaTroy Hawkins, Rockies reliever, 2007, 2014-15: I think because they let the elements intimidate them. They’re mind-f—ed already, before they even get there and before they even take the mound. They’re already mind-f—ed. And that’s not having a positive attitude about the situation. Hey, everybody else pitches in this stadium. Everybody else. I’m going to have to pitch in it too. Let me go in it with a positive mental approach — PMA — a positive mental approach to Coors Field. And that’s how I got through it.
Kyle Freeland, Rockies starter, 2017-present: It is not an easy place to pitch. It comes with its factors with the altitude, the dryness, how hard it is to recover in that environment that guys throughout the rest of the league don’t understand until they come to Coors for a four-game series and they realize their body feels like crap on Day 2, and that’s a big factor.
Shawn Estes, Rockies starter, 2004: You always looked at the calendar when the schedule opened and you knew when you were going to pitch and when you’re not going to pitch. So you know you have three trips into Coors and you have a pretty good idea if you’re going to pitch in any of those series. Put it this way, if you find out you’re not pitching for three games there, it’s probably the best road trip you take of the year.
Dipoto: I remember the first or second year of interleague [games], John Wetteland, who at that time was one of the best closers in the league, comes in and blows a save. He was really fighting himself. And the next day, he comes out and gets ready to walk in from the visitors bullpen and he [knocks] on the cage, and he looks at us all getting ready for the start of the game, and he says, “I have to know, how do you guys do this?” And everybody told him the same thing: “Short memory, man. You just have to move on.”
Ubaldo Jimenez, Rockies starter, 2006-11: Colorado is a different monster than anything else. If you go out there for a couple innings and you start throwing, I don’t know, 20, 25 pitches, you’re probably going to be out of breath right away. If you run to cover first base, when you go back to the mound, you’re going to feel the difference.
I wanted to be out there regardless of how difficult it was. I wanted to be out there for the fans. It made me develop; it made me be a better pitcher because I work hard. I work really hard. I worked so hard, running-wise and conditioning-wise. I remember I used to do the stairs in the stadium, or I used to go to Red Rocks Amphitheatre that’s like 20 minutes away from Denver, like going to the mountains. Rocky is the one who inspired me for sure. Every time I had to run in the mountains, I ran — I just didn’t chase the chicken. Other than that, I did pretty much everything Rocky did just to get ready for Coors Field.
Your stuff disappears in thin air: ‘They tell you to keep it down, don’t listen’
Pitchers are taught to “trust their stuff” from the time they first pick up a baseball, but at Coors Field, they learn quickly that pitches don’t do what’s expected.
During Dipoto’s four seasons in Colorado, Rockies relievers bonded over the shared experience of sitting beyond the outfield walls while waiting to go in and find out how their stuff would fare on a given night.
“There’s a storage room in the back of the bullpen at Coors Field, where during the course of a game — because you’re so far out, I mean, it’s the biggest field in the league — we would sit because we had a small TV at that time that would allow us to see what was happening in the game. … There’s these brick walls, painted brick walls. Every reliever had his own brick, and you got to write a message to all the relievers that came after you. It was related to the ballpark, some of the challenges. It was almost like a yearbook, but it was, in theory, preserved forever because it was on a brick wall.
“The trick was you weren’t allowed to have a brick until you gave up four runs in an inning. And everybody had a brick. So this was going on for like five years, and everybody who had come and gone had their own brick, even guys who were kind of small-time then. And [general manager] Bob Gebhard walked in one day and saw the messages on the wall and got angry with the relievers for writing on the wall and had the grounds crew paint over it. All of a sudden what was really something special that you could pass along from generation to generation, and mostly just laugh it off, like you have to be able to laugh at that, got covered over.
“My brick was something along the lines of, ‘They tell you to keep it down — don’t listen.’
“I went to Colorado. And the first thing — Billy Swift was one of our starters. And I walked into the clubhouse; we shared an agent. Billy shook my hand and he said, ‘Sinkerballer, right?’ And I said ‘yeah.’
“He said ‘Good luck, bro. It doesn’t work.'”
Even when the humidor was added after Dipoto’s time in Colorado, pitchers routinely saw their trusted pitch mixes abandon them at high altitude.
Spilborghs: A couple of years ago, they had to repaint in the bullpen [again], but if you went into the bullpen before, all there, all these great names of pitchers like Huston Street, Tito Fuentes, literally all these great bullpen arms, and they’d have their line — a third of an inning, nine hits, nine runs — written on the wall. Just to prove to you that Coors Field would get everybody.
Estevez: What you’re used to, it doesn’t work up there. If you’re a big sweeper guy, the sweeper doesn’t do anything, it just spins. Guys that are not up there for a long time, they go, like, “Man, my sweeper is off today.”
No, bro, it’s not. It’s just Coors Field. You’re fine. Trust me. That’s the thing. Even your fastball doesn’t ride as much. What plays better over there is changeups. It’s hard to find what truly works over there. For me, you’ve got to find the consistency.
Zack Wheeler, opposing pitcher: I’ve been lucky to miss it a bunch, thankfully. I did get roughed up there early in my career, but you hear about breaking stuff not breaking like it should. The ball flies, of course. When I made the All-Star team in 2021, when the game was there, the bullpen catcher told me to break out my changeup if I had a good one. I didn’t know about that until he told me. So now I tell everyone that I know, “Hey, if you have a good changeup, use it.”
Anderson: The ball flies, your stuff doesn’t move. When you throw two-seams, sometimes they cut. So if you’re a two-seam guy — like you know the seam-shift, right? I think what’s happening with some of these two-seams is they’re a seam-shift to two-seam where the seam catches, then it gets to two-seam. And maybe because the air is thinner it doesn’t have the same catch. So it just cuts instead.
Hoffman: The thing that I remember about pitching in Coors is that you just couldn’t feel the baseball.
The former star reliever tried different methods to get some moisture onto his hands to rub up the ball. Saliva didn’t work, because he would be dried out — it’d be like spitting cotton balls, he said. Remnants from chewing gum could make the surface too tacky.
Hoffman is in the Hall of Fame largely because of the excellence of a straight changeup that he threw — and when he pitched at Coors, it just wasn’t the same changeup.
The velocity was the same, but the pitch just didn’t have the same depth. I threw some good ones, but sometimes the changeup would just sit there, like it was on a tee.
Of course, it was Hoffman’s Padres teammate, Jake Peavy, who took the mound in the most famous game in Coors Field history — Game 163 of the 2007 MLB season.
Late in the regular season, the Padres were fighting to clinch a playoff spot and knew in the last weekend that if they tied the Rockies, necessitating a play-in game, the tiebreaker would be held in Coors Field. Needing just one win to wrap up a berth, the Padres lost on Saturday — and Jake Peavy met with manager Bud Black and general manager Kevin Towers and lobbied hard for them to let him pitch the next day in Milwaukee. Peavy begged Black and Towers to let him pitch Game 162 in Milwaukee on Sunday, and he thought that Towers would back him. But Peavy was overruled: Black and Towers hoped that the Padres would clinch without Peavy, so they could line him up against the Phillies’ Cole Hamels in Game 1 of the playoffs. Instead, the Padres lost Sunday, and Peavy started Game 163 in Colorado.
Peavy: I’ve been part of a lot of great games there, but that place is not baseball. It’s a different game than anywhere else. I was a sinker-slider guy, but I didn’t use the sinker there; I couldn’t. Because half the time the ball would cut and go the opposite way.
That team was hotter than anybody on the planet, and [the elevation] took my sinker away from me — and I didn’t have that against Holliday, Todd Helton and Troy Tulowitzki. That’s a huge weapon taken away.
What happened in Game 163 was classic Coors: Colorado led 3-0, fell behind 5-3, the two sides swapping the lead back and forth. Peavy allowed six runs in 6⅓ innings. The Padres took an 8-6 lead in the top of 13th, and in the bottom of the inning, the Rockies scored three to win 9-8 on Matt Holliday’s famous slide. Peavy has never looked at a replay of the close game-ending play at home plate.
What’s the point?” Once he’s called safe, it doesn’t matter anymore. We didn’t have replay back then.
Slaying the Coors Field monster: ‘My first time pitching at Coors was unbelievable’
Yet despite all of the horror stories, some pitchers have managed to succeed at Coors Field, whether for a single start or a sustained period — and speak of their experience in the same conquering manner a mountain climber would after scaling a hallowed peak.
Shawn Estes was well-versed in pitching at Coors Field when he joined the Rockies for the 2004 season, having spent the first seven seasons of his career with the division-rival San Francisco Giants. Though his 5.84 ERA was the worst of any full season during his 13-year career, he also won 15 games for the Rockies during his lone season in Denver, and he credits a mindset shift for helping him succeed.
“As a [Rockies] player pitching in Coors Field, I could care less what my ERA was. That wasn’t my mentality at all. It was about winning. And fortunately I had enough years of playing against the Rockies in Coors Field where I knew exactly what I was getting into.
“It was really trying to get through five innings, minimize the damage and know that your offense is going to score runs as well. As a visiting player, it was all about survival when you went to Coors Field and just trying to somehow get through the meat of that order with as little the damage as possible.”
But of the 34 starts he made for the Rockies in 2004 (15 of them in Colorado), it was the last time he took the mound at Coors Field in a home uniform that still resonates most for Estes, because he outdueled a Hall of Famer — and even registered a base hit off him.
“I remember beating Randy Johnson there for my 15th win in 2004. And I got a hit off him. Yep, I threw seven innings. That was probably my best game that season when you consider everything.”
Estes is not the only one who looks back with fondness at the times he stood tall at the game’s highest elevation.
Mark Leiter Jr., opposing pitcher: My first time pitching at Coors was unbelievable. I punched out nine in four innings. Second time I pitched at Coors, struck out five in the first two innings and it was early in the season so I got tired. I would say the thing about Coors is it definitely fatigues you a little more. That’s definitely real. And I think you have to be precise — like, you can’t have lazy finishes.
I feel like the second you change how you’re pitching because it’s there, you lose out on your flow. And that’s where I think guys get intimidated, if I had the right way to put it. Just being more selective and careful of your off-speed puts you probably in more of a defensive mode.
Jeremy Hefner, opposing pitcher: The game I pitched well, I think it was a makeup of a snowout earlier in the year. So we were somewhere, had to fly to Colorado for one day, and I end up making the start. I gave up a homer right down the left-field line to Tulo. I think CarGo [Carlos Gonzalez] may have hit a double or a hard hit. I got an RBI groundout — bases-loaded RBI groundout. I remember it being very sunny. The opposite of when we came earlier in the season.
Blake Snell, opposing pitcher: I can’t remember just one [horror story] but I can remember the opposite of one. July 19, 2016. My first game there. I gave up one hit. I was young and naïve. I’ve never pitched well there since.
When asked “What do you think of first when you think of Coors Field?” Snell paused before summing up what’s on the minds of many pitchers as they arrive in Colorado’s thin air.
When we fly out.
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