The Rockies win the pennant! The Rockies win the pennant! The Rockies win the pennant!
Fifty-six years after the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson hit the “shot heard ’round the world,” immortalized by Russ Hodges’ famous radio call — “The Giants win the pennant!” — the Colorado Rockies have won their own National League pennant, and have a chance to scale one of sports’ most storied peaks.
The Rockies are going to the World Series.
History has made a legend of Thomson and his game-winning home run against the Brooklyn Dodgers. And as much as we like to say these Rockies are modern legends themselves, it’s premature to write the history books.
Not only is the season incomplete — the World Series starts a week from today, against either the Boston Red Sox or the Cleveland Indians — but you can’t write history while it’s happening. That will be the job of historians, who will look back at the past few weeks with impartial perspective. They’ll decide where the Rockies’ great run stands in the annals of baseball.
But for now, we can lay out the indisputable facts:
The 2007 Colorado Rockies won 13 of their final 14 regular-season games. Then they won a one- game wild-card tiebreaker game against the San Diego Padres — after trailing by two runs in the 13th inning. Then they swept the Philadelphia Phillies in the division series. Finally, they swept the Arizona Diamondbacks in the National League Championship series, bringing the Rockies’ streak to 21 wins in their last 22 games.
And they’ve done it every way imaginable — one-run games, extra- inning wins, Coors Field slugfests, even a 13-0 shutout. They’ve done it on the road, at home, the regular season, the playoffs.
But most important, they’ve done it as a team.
No single player has carried the Rockies in this magical run. No single player has been bigger than the team. Every game produces a new hero — from Todd Helton, who hit a two-out, walkoff home run against the Dodgers in September, to Seth Smith, a rookie who got his first major league runs batted in on Monday night against the Diamondbacks.
Congratulations to every player on the Rockies’ roster. And congratulations to the coaching staff, management and ownership. In an age where the New York Yankees have a salary of $200 million, paid to a cast of free-agent all- stars, these Rockies are a homegrown bunch who came up together through the minor leagues and have hit their peak at exactly the right time — together.
There’s one more mountain to climb. Do the Rockies have a shot?
Yes. And it will be heard ’round the world.
