‘We had no sense this was coming’: Inside the Pac-12’s four-team expansion
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Kyle Bonagura, ESPN Staff Writer
LATE WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould touched down at Los Angeles International Airport after a chaotic few days. For months, she had worked to help the league’s remaining two schools — Oregon State and Washington State — position themselves for the future, and things were finally falling into place.
When she arrived at baggage claim, Gould received confirmation via email that the Pac-12 board had unanimously approved official applications for conference membership from Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and San Diego State, which had been submitted earlier in the day.
For the 35-year collegiate sports veteran and someone who had spent the bulk of the past 25 years affiliated with the Pac-12, it was hard to contain her excitement. Since stepping into the role in February, it was not always clear whether the conference had a future, and this ensured it would.
“We have a real opportunity to write a new story for the future and the new Pac-12,” Gould told ESPN the next day.
The Pac-12’s expansion efforts had been going on for weeks, but it wasn’t until early last week that all parties felt confident the moves were going to happen. By that point, the general framework of the new-look conference was agreed upon, and it became a matter of hammering out the details.
With university presidents and legal teams involved, the four Mountain West athletic directors remained in constant contact.
“Those conversations were being had multiple times a day, morning, noon and night,” Boise State athletic director Jeramiah Dickey said. “We were together in terms of jumping on calls and just talking through the what-if scenarios and potential opportunities that could exist and concerns and those type of things.”
Any concerns were outweighed by the potential of building something new. These schools had invested in their athletic department and football programs for years in preparation for this kind of opportunity, and while this wasn’t the same as joining the Pac-12 before its collapse, they strongly felt this move offered a better future than what they had in the Mountain West.
Those athletic directors’ counterparts around the conference were left in the dark, and when the news leaked late Wednesday night, several administrators at other Mountain West schools were caught off guard.
“There were some things after the fact that became more clear,” one Mountain West school administrator told ESPN. “Like certain people from those four schools not being present at meetings or generally unresponsive. It makes sense now, but we had no sense this was coming.”
For over a year, Oregon State and Washington State operated in the wilderness without a clear picture of what was ahead. During that time, they battled the departing schools — and absentee commissioner George Kliavkoff — in court for the Pac-12 assets and operational control. They chased television deals on their own, came to a scheduling agreement with the Mountain West in football, joined the West Coast Conference as affiliate members in other sports for two years and saw major leadership changes at the conference and institutional levels, with Gould replacing Kliavkoff and Anne McCoy replacing Pat Chun as the athletic director at WSU in March. Pac-12 staffing shrunk from about 190 at its peak to a skeleton crew of just over 30.
ESPN spoke with nearly two dozen sources familiar with the process to reveal how the Pac-12 emerged from that uncertainty and what comes next.
ON THE EVENING of July 10, at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, the Pac-12 hosted an event called “After Hours with the Beavs & Cougs.” The room was down the hall from where the United States men’s Olympic basketball team was headquartered in advance of the Paris games, and the hotel was also the designated media lodging for the Big 12 media days that wrapped up earlier in the day.
With only two schools, it didn’t make sense to hold a full-fledged media day. But with so many media members and others in the college athletics industry already in Vegas, the conference saw a chance to create some buzz with a more intimate gathering. The two head football coaches, OSU’s Trent Bray and WSU’s Jake Dickert, made the rounds. As did the two mascots, Benny and Butch. In the wake of the conference’s collapse the previous summer, though, there was also a somber tone.
After around 45 minutes of mingling, Gould addressed the room of about 100 people.
“This is supposed to be a fun night, and that’s why it looks different, it feels different,” she said. “We want you all to let your hair down and have a good time. … We have a bar in the back. Yes, we are drinking tonight during this event, and I would venture to say that if anyone has earned the right to drink, it’s the Pac-12.”
Always a great time After Dark 😏
More to come from tonight’s After Hours with the Beavs & Cougs! pic.twitter.com/JAc8Xd7W4g
— Pac-12 Conference (@pac12) July 11, 2024
The line killed, but no one left the Bellagio that night with a better understanding about what the future looked like. If anything, there was a growing sense in Las Vegas that OSU and WSU were being backed into the Mountain West and Gould’s role would be to spend the next two years tending to the dying embers of a conference with over a century of history.
If the Pac-12 were to survive, multiple industry sources presumed to ESPN at the time, it would likely have to come through a so-called reverse merger with the Mountain West. In that scenario, the Mountain West would have added OSU and WSU, continued to be operated by its current leadership — including commissioner Gloria Nevarez — and adopt the Pac-12 branding. That was never the preferred outcome of OSU and WSU, however, and over the past two months, Gould — as she was tasked to do when she was hired in February — worked to secure an outcome more favorable for the two schools.
On the same day the Pac-12 held its “After Hours” event, Nevarez kicked off her conference’s media day across town at the Circa Resort and Casino with a state of the conference address. She spoke confidently about the future of the conference and its strength and positioning.
“In this environment, our mantra is to be proactive and strategic to best position ourselves to navigate the future of college athletics,” Nevarez said. “Certainly transformation has hit [college athletics] pretty big in the last couple of years, and more is on its way, no doubt.”
To that end, Nevarez touted a presidential initiative intended to help the conference in the era of college realignment: a process known as “threatcasting.” The conference retained the help of Brian David Johnson, whom Nevarez described as an “internationally renowned threatcaster.”
Johnson serves as the director of the Threatcasting Lab at Arizona State, which states it strives to “provide a wide range of organizations and institutions actionable models to not only comprehend these possible futures but to a means to identify, track, disrupt, mitigate and recover from them as well.”
“He worked with us to model all the different futures in and around the college athletic space,” Nevarez said. “He’s providing us signals and wavefinders so that we have early detection for the more dire outcomes.”
To industry veterans, though, the need to hire an expert to outline the biggest threat to the Mountain West was puzzling. Oregon State and Washington State had already spelled out in a lawsuit for control of the Pac-12 filed last year their desire to rebuild the conference, in part, with conference assets. No other scenario that could threaten the Mountain West was remotely more plausible.
The Mountain West, sources said, felt protected by its bylaws and a poaching fee included in a football scheduling agreement it signed with the Pac-12 in December. To leave the conference, a school is required to pay roughly $18 million with two years of notice and $36 million with a one-year notice. And if the Pac-12 accepted a Mountain West school as a new member, the Pac-12 would be required to pay a $10 million fee, with escalators of $500,000 more for each additional school. (The four-school fee for Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State and San Diego State is $43 million.)
When the conferences signed the scheduling agreement in early December that added six Mountain West opponents for OSU and WSU this season, the Mountain West was operating from a position of strength and required a $14 million payment from the Pac-12. OSU and WSU needed a quick solution to fill their 2024 football schedules, and they were still fighting an appeal from the 10 departing Pac-12 members of a superior court ruling that granted them control of the conference. Even if the departing schools’ appeal failed — which it later did — there wasn’t a great sense of what the remaining assets would be.
Even so, when the scheduling agreement was announced, it included an instructive comment from Oregon State athletic director Scott Barnes: “We are still focused on re-building the Pac-12.”
At the time, the idea that in less than a year the Pac-12 would be willing to pay roughly $115 million for one-third of the Mountain West seemed unrealistic. For Mountain West leadership, that remained the case in July.
“We have a mutual desire to extend that relationship [with the Pac-12], and we’re currently in discussions about year two,” Nevarez said in her address in Las Vegas. “But for the time being, we’re really excited about playing them.”
In an interview with ESPN the next day, Nevarez reaffirmed her belief that a deal to extend the scheduling agreement with the Pac-12 would get done. The contract included an Aug. 1 date to open a window in which the conferences could execute a second year, she said, adding she was hopeful they could come to an agreement before then.
“We just have to connect, sign some docs and go,” she said.
IN DECEMBER, WHEN the scheduling agreement was signed, Kliavkoff was still technically the commissioner of the Pac-12. He would remain in the role until February, but after Oregon and Washington walked away from a media rights deal he put together with Apple on Aug. 4 — ensuring the conference’s collapse — Kliavkoff was mostly checked out.
With Oregon and Washington headed to the Big Ten, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah quickly followed Colorado to the Big 12. A month later, California and Stanford completed a move to the ACC, leaving OSU and WSU behind.
“Not only did it go down to two, but it felt like we didn’t have leadership,” Barnes told ESPN last month. “So [former WSU athletic director] Pat Chun and myself felt like we were co-commissioners for several months until Teresa was hired. We just didn’t feel like we had the support.”
It went so far that Kliavkoff was named in the lawsuit the two schools filed against the Pac-12 for operational control.
“It felt like he paid more attention to the teams that were exiting and placating the teams exiting than the two that were remaining,” Barnes said. “Why? It’s beyond me. I don’t know, but we literally fought for ourselves and in certain instances [Kliavkoff] came to the table late, but right out of the gate, I feel very strongly that he was advocating behind the scenes or elsewhere for the teams that were leaving and that we were not seeing a leader that was stepping up and helping protect our future the way that I believe a capable leadership should.”
When Gould was elevated from deputy commissioner to replace Kliavkoff in February, Barnes felt they had someone who was genuinely invested in helping their cause. Unlike Kliavkoff, who had no background in college sports when he was named commissioner in July 2021, Gould had worked her way up the ranks over the past 35 years.
Before being hired as the conference’s deputy commissioner in 2018, Gould was the interim athletic director at UC Davis, spent 14 years in various roles in the athletic department at Cal and had another eight years prior at the West Coast Conference, where she was an associate commissioner.
“Yeah, it’s been refreshing,” Barnes said. “I feel like we know we have a partner that is looking out for our best interests and one that has the leadership capacity to execute on the things that we prioritize, and she has done a fabulous job and just her short few months that she’s been here.”
After Gould was hired, the schools’ goal of rebuilding the Pac-12 wasn’t the primary focus. Both schools felt they belonged in a power conference, with their peers of the past 100 years.
“When I got this job, I had a lot of people kind of in the background cheering me on going, ‘We can’t wait to see you rebuild the Pac-12,'” Gould told ESPN two weeks ago. “I’ve been in this league for 25 years. There’s certainly a lot of nostalgia around that idea, but that’s not what I was hired to do. What I was hired to do is figure out a future conference path for these two institutions that achieves the guiding principles we’ve agreed on.”
(The leadership structure changed again in March, when Chun left for rival Washington. He was replaced on an interim basis by McCoy, the school’s senior deputy AD, who was named to the job on a permanent basis in June.)
After OSU and WSU’s desire to join the Big 12 was firmly rebuffed, sources said, they gamed out possible scenarios that could come in the wake of various rulings in the four lawsuits related to Clemson and Florida State’s attempts to exit the ACC. None of those amounted to more than a gamble, and didn’t fit their timeline.
WHEN TALKS ABOUT extending the scheduling agreement started a few weeks after media day, little progress was made. The Mountain West overestimated how vulnerable the Pac-12 was from a negotiating position and asked for more than the $14 million it received last year, with the Pac-12 countering with less than half that.
“We just never could really seem to gain a lot of traction for year two so that everybody felt really good about it,” McCoy told ESPN at the Apple Cup on Saturday. “I think, and I can’t speak for the Mountain West, but I know from the Pac-12, in our perspective, it just seemed like we always were just so far apart in what we thought should happen.”
Unlike when the initial deal was signed with Kliavkoff in charge, OSU and WSU were now in control of the Pac-12 assets — they secured roughly $250 million when the departures were finalized — and had more time to make alternative scheduling plans for 2025. When it became clear the Sept. 1 deadline to extend the agreement would pass, the Pac-12 became more serious about attempting a true rebuild.
Much of the vetting of potential candidates and outreach was handled by Navigate, a private sports consulting firm, sources said. The Pac-12 would be willing to help fund the exit fees, the schools were told, which took away the primary risk factor. Had the four been required to come up with a combined $72 million on their own, it would have been much more difficult to justify the jump — especially without a firm understanding of what kind of media deal the new-look conference could command.
The schools also knew to expect the Mountain West to attempt to withhold media rights distributions for departing schools over the next two years — roughly $5 million per school, per year — as it did when BYU, TCU and Utah all left in 2011. It’s unclear what the total cost will be to the schools and Pac-12 to the Mountain West when the dust settles.
“There is a lot of negotiation that still needs to happen between the Pac-12 and the Mountain West and among the various schools on what that exit is going to look like, what scheduling alliances are going to look like and all sorts of different details,” Colorado State president Amy Parsons said. “We have some time on that. We’re playing out the Mountain West all of next year and into the following. We will not have those details pinned down for some time.
“We are grateful to the Pac-12 that they’re investing in the four schools who are leaving the Mountain West in a way that makes us feel comfortable that we’re going to come out strong and ready to really compete at that level. But a lot of details [to get figured out] going forward.”
For years, the teams at the top of the Mountain West in terms of investment had grown tired of the bottom third’s inability to keep up, which contributed to the appeal of this model as opposed to adding OSU and WSU to the Mountain West, sources said.
Another theory that had been floating around since last year is the possibility that nine Mountain West schools could vote to dissolve the conference, freeing them up to move to the Pac-12 together without being required to pay exit fees. It was a possibility that received some informal discussion, a source said, but it never progressed to the point where anyone seriously considered pushing for it.
Once the Pac-12 fully committed to the rebuild, things moved quickly. Last Monday, there was a growing sentiment among stakeholders on both sides that it was likely to happen, and by Tuesday it was nearly a done deal. On Wednesday, the four schools all formally applied for membership, which required approval of the four-person Pac-12 board — made up of the presidents and athletic directors at OSU and WSU.
Nevarez caught wind of the possibility early last week, sources said, but the departing schools did not communicate their intention to leave before the deals were done.
With six schools, the Pac-12 still has to add at least two more by July 1, 2026, and there is not a firm timeline for when those additions will be made.
“I would like to move as swiftly as we can,” Barnes said. “Sort of the old John Wooden adage, ‘Be quick, but don’t hurry,’ in that regard. We don’t have any limitations on who we may visit with and we’ll move as quickly and thoroughly as we can. On the other side of that certainly is a chance to go out to market for a new media deal.”
The conference is expected to explore options in the American Athletic Conference — namely Tulane and Memphis — but it’s too early to say what the true appetite will be. Without a significant increase in their current media deal — AAC schools receive about $7 million annually — it becomes tougher to justify the added logistical hurdles of playing in a conference with a larger footprint, especially as a geographic outlier.
There is a good chance additional Mountain West schools could eventually find their way to the Pac-12. UNLV, for example, was a surprising omission this round for many industry sources given its relatively similar profile to the four departing schools, but the conference was steadfast in starting with this group.
“I can’t say I’m surprised [UNLV was not included] because I was pleased with the configuration, and actually the metrics and the metrics spoke to the decision-making process, and I and they were very, very objective in that sense,” San Diego State president Adela de la Torre said. “So in my mind, I think it was the best four that were selected.”
TWO DAYS AFTER the announcement, Washington State capped off the week with a victory in the Apple Cup against Washington at Lumen Field in Seattle. The Cougars’ goal-stand with 1:12 left to preserve the 24-19 win ignited a memorable celebration that started in the field and carried into the locker room and, for coach Jake Dickert, the postgame news conference.
To Dickert, the conference news was a welcome development, but what happens next, he said, is more important.
“This is the critical point for Washington State athletics right now. What are we going to do to invest in the future?” he said. “We let some new teams in, we have an opportunity to stay ahead of the curve to compete for championships if we want to invest, right?
“I don’t get my check from Washington State athletics. I get it from Washington State University. The university needs to invest in the athletics program and this football team every step of the way. That’s exactly what it’s going to take and you’re going to see more days just like this, but where we’re currently at is not enough so we’re putting in a big picture. If you can’t be proud of what the Cougs are doing right now, I can’t really help you.”
It’s a similar perspective at the conference level in that the developments from last week are important, but only foundational in nature.
“The outreach and the outpouring of people that are not only cheering us on saying, ‘This is awesome, we’re so excited about this,’ has been really significant,” Gould said. “And I think it just supports what I already knew, which is that people really care about the Pac-12 and about the brand and about it continuing long into the future.”
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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Alden Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES — Tyler Glasnow was put on the injured list Monday with what the Los Angeles Dodgers described as shoulder inflammation, joining fellow frontline starter Blake Snell, who has been sidelined by a similar injury.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said Glasnow’s right shoulder is structurally sound but is also dealing with what Roberts called “overall body soreness.”
Glasnow gave up back-to-back homers in Sunday’s first inning against the Pittsburgh Pirates, then was removed from the game after experiencing discomfort while warming up for the second. Afterward, Glasnow expressed frustration at his constant string of injuries and speculated that his latest ailment might stem from the mechanical adjustments he made to improve the health of his elbow.
Glasnow sat out the 2½ months of last season — including the playoffs — with what was initially diagnosed as an elbow sprain, a big reason why the Dodgers were relegated to only three starting pitchers in their march toward a World Series title. Now, he is one of eight starting pitchers on the Dodgers’ injured list.
One of those arms, Tony Gonsolin, will be activated Wednesday to make his first major league start in 20 months. But the Dodgers are short enough on pitching that they’ll have to stage a bullpen game the day before.
“Pitching is certainly volatile,” said Roberts, who added journeyman right-hander Noah Davis to the roster in Glasnow’s place. “We experienced it last year and essentially every year. I think the thing that’s probably most disconcerting is the bullpen leading Major League Baseball in innings. When you’re talking about the long season, the starters are built up to go take those innings down. That’s sort of where my head is at as far as trying to make sure we don’t redline these guys in the pen.”
Dodgers relievers entered Monday’s series opener against the Miami Marlins having accumulated 121⅓ innings, 7⅔ more than the Chicago White Sox, who are already on a 122-loss pace.
Glasnow and Snell aren’t expected to be out for a prolonged period, but their timetables are uncertain. Clayton Kershaw could return before the end of May, but Shohei Ohtani might not serve as a two-way player until after the All-Star break. Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki could temporarily assume a traditional five-day schedule, as opposed to the once-a-week routine they’ve been following, but the Dodgers have only four starting pitchers on their active roster.
Glasnow, 31, is in his 10th year in the big leagues but has never compiled more than 134 innings in a season, a mark he set last year. The Dodgers acquired him from the Tampa Bay Rays and subsequently signed him to a five-year, $136.56 million extension in December 2023 with the thought that his injury issues might be behind him.
“Tyler said it — very frustrating,” Roberts said. We’re just trying to get to the bottom of it.”
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