Thirty years ago this week I was able to do something I’d never done before and, quite likely, will never be able to do again.
I attended the first home contest of a major American professional sports team’s history.
My buddy Mike and I loaded up our rented white Chevy bright and early Thursday morning, April 8, 1993, and headed out of St. Clair Shores, MI, bound for for Denver, CO.
Our immediate destination: His brother Tom’s place where we’d sleep fast and sleep hard.
Our ultimate destination: The right field grand stands of Mile High Stadium for Friday afternoon’s Montreal Expos at Colorado Rockies game. The first home game in the expansion Rockies’ history.
I remember only a few things about the drive out:
- As we traversed Illinois and Iowa and Nebraska we witnessed first-hand the damage being done by one of the most catastrophic floods in the history of the upper Mississippi River and Missouri River’s history. If Mike and I said it once during our journey we said it more than dozen times, “There’s a lot of cresting going on.”
- When Mike was behind the wheel he had the curious habit of honking the horn lightly whenever he spotted livestock off the side of the highway. To this day, I’m unsure what that was all about.
- We visited a Pizza Hut in Iowa City, IA, for our primary sustenance – beyond a couple dozen cookies my mom sent along – on the journey west.
- It takes forever to traverse Nebraska! I’ve never had the pleasure of driving across Montana, but it can’t be any worse than the Cornhusker State.
We touched down sometime around 2 a.m. local time after a solid 20-hour plus trek from Michigan and poured ourselves into whatever we slept in that night.
I’d love to say we had a pregame breakfast at 4G’s Mexican (one of my favorite joints in Denver), but I don’t think that was the case. Maybe it was the Breakfast Queen which I recall was near the home Tom rented.
Regardless, we were in our seats good and early for the 3:05 p.m. start and I was frosty – and still am to this day! You see, I’m a Superstation WTBS kid who watched his share of Atlanta Braves games throughout the 1980s and I was excited to see late-addition to the Rockies’ roster, Dale Murphy, patrol right field. Alas, I was forced to watch Dante Bichette get the start. I may have vocalized my displeasure … repeatedly … that afternoon. At least Murphy made an appearance late and I was able to see one of his six hits in this, his final two months of MLB action.
The game was ELECTRIC! Darn near 81,000 fans were in the stadium that day and when 5-foot-9 second baseman Eric Young led off the home half of the first with a solo shot to deep left center you’d have thought John Elway had finally delivered a Super Bowl victory.
Third baseman Charlie Hayes followed a few batters later with a 2-run shot and the rout was on. Colorado led 11-0 heading into the 9th inning when the Expos scored four meaningless runs.
What we did later that evening or the next day is now lost to time. I do recall, however, that Nebraska still took an eternity to cross that the rivers were still cresting on our Easter Sunday travels back to Michigan and that the Iowa City Pizza Hut once again provided us with the fuel we needed to get home.