Roberto Clemente Day and honoring the Pittsburgh Pirates legend
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Howard Bryant, ESPN Senior Writer
IT WAS A JOURNEY that was never intended to be a quest. Life simply turned it into one — life, plus a single motivating sentence from the most influential of voices, assisted by a dose of divinity.
One day nearly 20 years ago, Vera Clemente, widow of the legendary Roberto Clemente, entered the studio of photographer Duane Rieder before the 2006 All-Star Game, to be played at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park. The studio had once been an old firehouse — Pittsburgh’s Engine No. 25 — situated in the Lawrenceville section of the city. Built in 1896, the structure had been condemned when Rieder purchased it from the city in 1994 for the grand sum of a dollar.
Rieder had been preparing a pre-All-Star party for the Clemente family and adorned his studio with striking photos of Clemente as well as an archive of Clemente memorabilia and ephemera he had been collecting for the previous decade. He had met Vera after he had created a calendar of Clemente photos to commemorate the last All-Star Game at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium in 1994. The following year, Rieder had assisted Vera in restoring damaged photos of the Clementes’ visit to the White House with President Nixon following the 1971 World Series, the moment that cemented Roberto Clemente nationally as what he had been known as locally for the previous 16 seasons: a transcendent great.
The photos were of particular importance to Vera, who lost her husband in one of the greatest tragedies in the history of American sports. On New Year’s Eve 1972, Clemente’s hastily loaded plane carrying relief supplies to Nicaraguan earthquake victims crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from Puerto Rico. Financial difficulty and indignity followed: Locals began stealing valuable Clemente items from the family home in Puerto Rico, including Vera and Roberto’s wedding album.
When she entered Rieder’s studio, she saw the striking photos of Clemente on the studio walls, including “Angel Wings,” the famous shot of Clemente stretching to make a catch while the clouds behind him seem to form a pair of wings behind his shoulders.
“Duane,” Rieder recalls Vera telling him, “You should make a museum of this place.”
Rieder then presented Vera Clemente with a priceless gift he had acquired from years of “calling in favors” and kismet — a photo album of pictures from the wedding she had never seen before.
Less than 60 days later, the Clemente Museum opened, and a life’s work would transform a building once condemned.
“I’m going to give Roberto and the Big Guy upstairs a lot of credit,” Rieder says, “for the things that evolved in this building.”
THE CLEMENTE MUSEUM
THE CLEMENTE MUSEUM is a 12,000-square-foot homage to the man Pittsburgh has called “The Great One” for more than a half-century. According to Rieder, 10,000 visitors come to the museum annually. The nonprofit museum is not affiliated with the Pirates or Major League Baseball, and the money to keep it running comes from baseball die-hards, deep-pocketed Clemente die-hards — Rieder credits Eddie Vedder, the frontman for the rock band Pearl Jam, with keeping the doors open during the pandemic. Credit also, of course, belongs to the soul, spirit and sweat of the museum’s owner.
The Clemente Museum is accessible by appointment only and functions largely on the honor system — few of the 650 or so Clemente items are protected from the public by casing and so the museum trusts its patrons to not touch items or try to steal them. The converted firehouse can feel dark and foreboding with its heavy woods, a portal back into the 19th century of handlebar mustaches and horse-drawn fire carriages. Touches of the old firehouse remain — two holes in the first-floor ceiling, one still with its fire pole. The other was removed to make room for the front door.
When it is lit, the museum transforms into a shrine that feels uniquely Pittsburgh — an original baseball town since 1882. The museum is approached by fans, celebrities and big-league players as a pilgrimage and sanctuary. Manny Machado, the Padres third baseman, spends the night at the museum at least once a season. Virtually every visiting team makes a late-night stop after games, to pay tribute to The Great One, and also to relax in the basement of the speakeasy-style winery, wood-fired oven and cigar bar (named after Pirates catcher Francisco Cervelli) that is the basement. Many of them take turns swinging the massive 38-ounce bat the 5-foot-11, 175-pound Clemente swung. During a recent four-game series with Washington, 34 members of the Nationals came to the museum. One of them was Darren Baker, 25, who made his big-league debut this month. He was amused to come across a 1968 photo of a 19-year-old Dusty Baker in the Marines hanging on the wall — according to legend, Dusty broke Clemente’s Marines record for pullups. Dusty, of course, is Darren’s father and a legend in his own right. Yet for every anecdote, irony and eerie coincidence that lends the impression that the space was ordained, there is three decades of sweat behind it that give the stories meaning, that make them real.
Without Rieder, a 63-year-old with the spirit of a college freshman, physically pulling the electrical wires and knocking out part of the ceiling, revealing the original Carnegie Steel beam with the No. 21 on it — signifying the 21-inch thickness of the beam — the coincidences would have remained buried, or worse, nonexistent, bulldozed by time, progress, new structures erasing old history.
“The stories come to this building because we saved it,” Rieder says.
When the firehouse closed in 1972 — largely because of age and because the new trucks were so big they could no longer fit through the wooden doors of a building built in the 19th century — Engine 25 served as a hub for EMS vehicles. By the early 1990s, the buildings were in disrepair and the city had agreed to tear down more than a dozen of the old firehouses. Engine 25 was condemned when Rieder first looked into buying it. It was, he says, a “haven for pigeon poop and rats.”
“This part of town, Lawrenceville, was a mess,” he says. “People told me I was crazy buying here. The neighborhood was in such bad shape, you were taking your life into your own hands parking on the street … and the place needed so much work. It had no running water. Estimates were running me $500,000 in renovations.”
In 1994, Rieder settled on another studio, in Polish Hill. The papers were signed. The deal had closed. Engine No. 25 faced another destiny against the wishes of angry Lawrenceville residents: It was scheduled to become a nightclub. There was no way out, until Jimmy Ferlo, the powerful city councilman of the 7th District, stepped in. “I said, ‘Jimmy, there’s no way out. We’ve closed,” Rieder recalls. “Jimmy said, ‘Do you want it, yes or no?'” In a scene that sounds like a movie, Ferlo ripped up Rieder’s closing papers on the Polish Hill spot, and the move to the firehouse was miraculously done.
The firehouse was haunted by a dark coincidence: Engine No. 25 permanently closed its doors on Dec. 31, 1972, at 9 p.m. ET; a thousand miles away and about 20 minutes later, Clemente’s plane had just taken off and began its fateful descent. Undeterred, Rieder renovated the building, piece by piece. A welder by trade who refers to himself as “severely dyslexic,” Rieder put his life into the building. Sanding the floors. Scavenging for wood and coal. Renovating the original tin panels that adorn the second-floor ceiling. Finding old pieces — like the filing cabinet from a nearby printing press. Rescuing old photos, like Angel Wings, from the trash.
Rieder met Vera Clemente the following year, and he began to archive Clemente materials. A vision of a museum was taking shape — but did not become one until Vera Clemente’s suggestion more than a decade later.
“If I wasn’t a photographer and a workaholic, this couldn’t have happened,” Rieder says. “Who could do this? Even if you had all the money in the world, could you do this? Because it wasn’t about money. And I’m not bragging when I say this kind of stuff. It was just piece by piece, putting your work into your interests.”
When the museum officially opened in 2006, Rieder had been working on the building for a dozen years. In between, he honed another craft, learning to make wine. First photography. Then wine. Then baseball. “Every Italian in Pittsburgh made their own wine,” he says. “I started making dago red. It was just a hobby at first.” Now, big-league players from Pete Alonso to Ryan Zimmerman to Josh Bell have barrels of wine in the cellar speakeasy as part of Rieder’s wine club.
Sarah Kelsey, a part-timer at the museum with a soothing voice and gentle demeanor, did not come to the Clemente for the baseball. She is originally from Arlington, Virginia, but needing a life change seven years ago, she arrived in Western Pennsylvania. She now speaks of the region — and the Clemente — as a place of soft refuge. She met Duane Rieder for the wine, and remained for the architecture, the community, what she referred to as the magical nature of the building — the cherry floors in the basement, sloped slightly to the right because the firehouse, built in 1896, once doubled as a horse stable in the days before fire trucks and the floors needed to be sloped for drainage.
On the second floor, the light pierces the wide room as though through stained glass, accentuating the wide-plank floors, and the original woodwork. The second floor contains catnip for Clemente fanatics: the 1961 silver bat commemorating his first batting title, dented because his kids used it to hit. The museum is for Kelsey a place of peace. “It is a beautiful building,” she says. “The building feels safe. Every time I come here, I see something new, and I hear something new. It is a very uplifting place. People are moved by it. I’m happy and humbled, and lucky to be here. When people come here, they want to talk about their lives. They want to donate things — albums, cuff links. They feel the need to share.”
Three times the museum has been saved, by luck or divinity. In 2006, Rieder’s most famous photo — of the Steelers praying before a game — went viral after a television station did a story on Rieder before the Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl. The selling of the iconic print saved Rieder from a tax accounting error that put him in arrears. “I paid off the IRS,” he says. “Sixty thousand. In cash.”
In 2009, the museum nearly burned to the ground. “It was my fault,” Rieder says. “I was doing the plumbing. I was heating up the copper pipes with a torch, and it caught on to the insulation and started burning. The power went out, and I was in total blackness. I saw a ball of fire. I could see it behind the drywall, so I punched holes in the drywall with my fist, found the piece of insulation and stamped it out. Then, I fixed the pipe and went home.”
In 2020, the pandemic nearly closed the shrine. But Eddie Vedder saved it. “He filmed a video for us, like a virtual fundraiser,” Rieder says. “He sent a guitar signed by the whole band. We auctioned everything off and raised $100,000.
“We were closed for almost two full years and the bills were piling up. He supports a hundred charities, and we were lucky to be one of them. So, thank the Lord for Eddie Vedder.”
THE LORE OF ROBERTO CLEMENTE
IN THIS TOWN, Clemente endures as perhaps no other player in any other big-league city. He is not claimed in the way of a Ruth or Williams or Mays — respected for the memories, awed by their abilities. Nearly 70 years after his major-league debut and 52 years after his death, Clemente stands closer to Henry Aaron, not just admired, but revered. The main bridge crossing the Allegheny River leading into PNC Park is the Roberto Clemente Bridge. At the foot of the bridge is the Clemente statue. At the stadium itself, there are distractions for kids, and a bar in center field for adults, and perhaps the best views in baseball, all animated by the excitement generated by rookie fireballer Paul Skenes, but it’s the Clemente images throughout that make watching a game here feel grounded. In the team shop at the stadium, Clemente jerseys are still prominently displayed. He remains the city’s conscience.
Art Rodriguez, a retired dentist who works at the museum with an almost ancestral connection to it, conducts many of the private tours. Rodriguez still owns the scorecard from his first baseball game: July 28, 1968, at Forbes Field. The Cardinals were in town. The Pirates won 7-1. Clemente, the son of a cane crop worker, went 3-for-4 with a triple and two runs scored. Rodriguez and his father, Archie, stopped scoring the Cardinals after the second inning. The Pirates kept their attention until the sixth, when Clemente struck out to end the inning. Bob Gibson didn’t pitch that day, but Rodriguez would never forget the aura of Gibson while trying for an autograph: green turtleneck, gold chain. No signature. Rodriguez was seven years old.
Rodriguez grew up in Donora, about 30 miles from Pittsburgh, birthplace of the famous Stan Musial, and Ken Griffey Jr. It was Musial that connected the Rodriguez generations to baseball, and it was work that drew the family to Pittsburgh. His grandfather on his father’s side, Manuel, came over from Oviedo, Spain, in 1917 and worked in the Western Pennsylvania zinc mills. On his mother’s side, his grandfather, Dominic, came to America from Ceto, Italy, in 1913 and worked in the coal mines. Their story was the immigrant-American story: the grandparents, one set from Spain, one from Italy, spoke some English and had no interest in sports. The next generations became American through sports, the father with Musial, the son, Clemente.
During his tours, Rodriguez does not revel in Clemente’s prodigious statistical achievements — a .317 career average, 3,000 hits, four batting titles, 12 straight Gold Glove awards — as much as he focuses tourgoers on the man and the price he paid during his times. Clemente faced the discrimination of the Black players of his era and the anti-Latin sentiment common in baseball. Reporters would quote Spanish-speaking players phonetically, as if to mimic their poor English. Clemente resented attempts to Americanize him. The museum features several editions of Clemente cards where his name is listed as “Bob Clemente” instead of “Roberto.” For years, Clemente internalized those resentments before challenging his teammates as athletes and as men.
“I really emphasize the racism he faced, and yet he was so stoic,” Rodriguez says. “He had a way of getting to people. He knew he probably should speak out. He could convey that if you were a bigot, you couldn’t be a good man, and that resonates so much to the messages of today.”
In his tours, Rodriguez senses when visitors recognize the parallels between the xenophobia Clemente faced as a player and the nation’s current divisions. Before winning over the baseball world with his play and humanitarianism, Clemente endured the rising sentiment within the sport that baseball had hired too many minorities and, despite the greatness of him and players like Mays and Aaron, the game was diminished because of integration.
“If you’re Black or an immigrant, the message is ‘You have ruined our country,’ and that is the appeal,” Rodriguez says, alluding to the rising political rhetoric over the past several years and its parallels to the Clemente years. “I guess coming from a family of Spanish and Italian immigrants, I relate to whom those comments are directed. He didn’t say it. His supporters didn’t say it. But that is the feeling. I’m blown away by it. If someone had told me that racism would be as present to the degree as it was during Clemente’s time, I wouldn’t have believed it. It’s really important for the young people to understand.”
Clemente is an indelible part of American mythology. So is baseball. So is Pittsburgh. The reverence is rooted in the rare person who died as he lived and thus is not diminished by time. The Pirates won two World Series during the Clemente years, but the Pirates and his legend are uncomplicated because the Steelers during the 1960s were not the great team they would become. Then there is Pittsburgh, the Steel City of unpretentiousness and integrity people like to believe they embody — but most often do not.
Duane’s wife, Kate, definitely does. She is a shy, funny woman with mischievous eyes who says far less than she is thinking. Where people will refer to her husband as “the mayor of Pittsburgh” for his indefatigable gregariousness and constant availability, Kate Rieder is the opposite — and often provides the governor to her husband’s limitless generosity. It is common for the Rieders to get a late-night phone call from MLB players or coaches — the Nationals manager Davey Martinez, for instance — who want to pop by the museum for cigars, a glass and soak up the aura of The Great One. “I don’t do the public thing,” she says. “It’s fine as long as I don’t have to do it.” She grew up in the South Hills area, repeating, in a small sense, part of her childhood. Her father, an old New Englander and die-hard Red Sox fan from Nashua, New Hampshire, who became synonymous with Pittsburgh, was known all over town, the legendary KDKA-TV meteorologist Bob Kudzma. Kudzma was on the air for 34 years. But unlike Duane, who is naturally extroverted, Kate Rieder remembers her father, who passed away in 2021 as a private man with a public occupation. Off-camera, she says he kept to himself and his family.
She marvels at Duane’s energy. “He always finds time to create every thing. He never stops. He helps people. He’s super thoughtful. He’s like the Energizer Bunny.”
Nick Barnicle, a film producer who shot a documentary, including of Duane’s Clemente collection and spent extensive time with them at the museum, said, “Kate is the Landau to Duane’s Springsteen. The Robin to Duane’s Howard. The Varitek to Duane’s Pedro. Without Kate, it’s just not the same.”
THE PROPELLER
BRIAN, THE UBER DRIVER taking me to the museum on a recent late-summer day, drives in silence for several blocks before glancing again at his phone to confirm my destination. “The Clemente Museum,” he says evenly. His tone is curiously monotone — something bothers him. Through several red lights, Brian finally reveals the mystery of his ambivalence. “The propeller is in there,” he tells me. “It’s right there. That has never sat well with me.”
To the left of the front entrance of the museum, at roughly 11 o’clock, sits a vertically rectangular plexiglass case protecting a lone, damaged gray-black propeller blade. It is one of the blades from the DC-7 that plunged Clemente fatally into the Atlantic. After the crash, the newspapers showed the photos from Puerto Rico, of the search and rescue. The most prominent one featured Pirates catcher Manny Sanguillén, the only teammate to go into the water as part of the effort, heartbroken, trudging waist-high through the surf.
In 2013, St. Louis came to Pittsburgh, and Carlos Beltrán, the star Cardinals outfielder and another in the line of great Puerto Rican players, visited the museum. Soon after, Beltran told Rieder of a find: The father of Beltran’s friend was the captain of the Coast Guard ship that pulled the plane wreckage from the sea.
“I later get a call from Carlos’s friend, an architect named Angel, who was helping Carlos design his academy,” Rieder says, staring into the case. “He says, ‘Sit down. I want to send you a picture.’ A photo of a propeller comes. It’s laying in his buddy’s garage. He says, ‘Would you ever want this?’ And I went, ‘Holy cow. Is that the propeller from the plane?'”
Rieder acquired the blade at the end of 2013, and the next year began displaying it full time in the museum. But not before dealing with the question of displaying the blade — whether its appearance in the museum was necessary or gratuitous — in an emotional meeting with Vera Clemente and her three sons, Maurice, Ricky and Roberto Jr.
“There had been an auction house in Puerto Rico selling off parts of the plane,” Rieder says. “And the family said to please take those items out of the auction. So later, the family is coming to Pittsburgh to talk about Clemente Day. They say they’re coming over. I said, ‘OK, head’s up: I have a piece I want to talk about and you guys can vote. If you say it stays, it stays. If you say it doesn’t, it goes. So they show up and I had it in the middle of the room. I had it covered with a black piece of cloth. So I pulled off the tarp, and Vera, Maurice and Ricky all said, ‘OK. I think it should be here.’ A museum should tell the truth, should tell the story. Roberto Jr. got very emotional and ran out the door.”
Rieder had his own reason why he felt it necessary to display the propeller: to dispel the myth that the plane was never recovered. “Roberto’s body was never found,” he says. “That part is true, but we do hundreds of tours and someone in the tour always makes mention that the plane was never found. All Puerto Ricans know they found the plane. They stood on the shoe for three days watching the Coast Guard pieces up on deck, and that’s where it came from.”
Vera died in 2019, and Rieder eventually reached an agreement with Roberto Jr.: When he was in town, the Museum would cover the blade, and wheel it out of sight. One day, Roberto Jr. arrived on short notice. With no time to remove the blade to a back room, Rieder scrambled to cover the propeller with a poster.
“The posters weren’t tall enough,” Rieder recalls. “He walked in and said, “I’m cool with it now. So, it took him a few years, but he agreed that it’s part of the story. They found the plane.”
RETIRE NO. 21
ON THE COUNTER at the museum, in Pirate black-and-gold, are circular stickers that read “RETIRE 21,” a plea for Major League Baseball to do for Clemente what it did for Jackie Robinson and what the National Hockey League has done for Wayne Gretzky: universally retire Clemente’s iconic No. 21.
The retirement push is a grassroots effort that has deep emotional resonance to its supporters — no player is a greater inspiration to the Latino players who now dominate the sport than Clemente, the first Latino inducted into the Hall of Fame. Major League Baseball, however, has not pledged its support, as universal retirement of a number is extremely rare. When baseball finally retired Robinson’s No. 42 during the 50th anniversary of his debut in 1997, it was not without controversy. The idea did not come from the commissioner’s office, but from National League president Len Coleman.
The league office maintains that Clemente is already appropriately honored by baseball through the Roberto Clemente Award, given annually to the player who best demonstrates community and humanitarian commitments. Still, retiring Clemente’s number is a topic that has drawn the attention of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Executive director Tony Clark tells me he supports retiring Clemente’s number, but he would prefer the players take it upon themselves: Instead of waiting to be told by the commissioner’s office that the number is retired, Clark wishes the players would collectively agree to no longer wear No. 21. That, Clark says, would be an even more powerful gesture.
THE PLACE TO BE
THE CLEMENTE MUSEUM is a go-to spot for the out of towners looking to score cool points, and for celebrities and dignitaries to pay their respects — and to visit the winery downstairs. Eddie Vedder has a table. One chair has the name “Smokey” painted on the back, because that’s the chair where Smokey Robinson sat and drank. (“I make a semi-sweet Riesling for him,” Rieder says.)
Politically this year, Pennsylvania is a battleground state, inundated with attack ads from both political parties. Virtually every analysis of the 2024 election expects Pennsylvania to be decisive, and so it is that during a recent late-summer week, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is in town on a campaign stop, and the Clemente Museum is on the short list of local businesses the VP intends to visit.
Harris doesn’t appear on the day I visit, but an old Pittsburgher does: U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. Flanked by two Secret Service agents, the 73-year-old Vilsack and his wife, Christie, tour the museum before settling in the basement for some wine and stories. Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa from 1999 to 2007, is a Pittsburgh native, from the Squirrel Hill section.
Vilsack sips his wine as the Secret Service stands quietly at a short distance. Periodically, the secretary will take another piece of the lore of the building from Rieder, some impossible connection that must be apocryphal, like the repeated story that Lou Gehrig slept in the firehouse during the 1927 Yankees-Pirates World Series. “OK, now you’re pulling my leg.” The mythology is too great to be true.
“First of all, who could ever find that out, but me, because I’m here, in a building that we saved,” Rieder says. “And now people are coming taking Clemente tours, and a woman was on a tour and she said her father was the chief that shut this place down. If I don’t get her here to get that story and ask her to bring him here, we wouldn’t know these things. We did a good thing, and it wasn’t on purpose. I was just looking for a place for my studio.”
There is Clemente. There is America. There is Pittsburgh. Across the table from Vilsack is a wine barrel with the burly outline of Bruno Sammartino, the legendary professional wrestler who settled as a teenager in Pittsburgh, in the North Oakland section. Rieder shows him a 1967 Polaroid photo of Clemente and Sammartino. At the bottom of the photo, inscribed in pen, read the words, “Bruno & Roberto.” Next to their names are their respective weights: 275-175. Vilsack nods in acknowledgement, relents to the power of the shrine, of Pittsburgh, and buys four bottles of wine to go.
“This really is a testament to a man who’s been gone 50 years,” Vilsack says. “I’ve seen things here I never expected to see.”
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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