Has it really been nearly 10 years since the Colorado Rockies went on that magical run that culminated in the club’s first National League pennant?
In this anniversary series, Rocktober Revisited, we’re looking back on how the Rockies fared throughout the 2007 season. It’s a month-by-month look at what transpired to lead Colorado to the World Series and a special place in the sports memory banks of everyone in the Mile High City.
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Unlike the April and May of that storied season, the Rockies managed to dig their way out of last place in the National League West in the month of June. Sure, they were fourth out of five teams, but it was an omen of successes to come, no matter how small.
The Rockies finished that month at just 14-13, but the progress they were making in turning around April, a month that produced an uninspiring 10-16 record, was undeniable. Something special was in the works for the end of the season, and each month up through September was slowly starting to crescendo in that direction.
Throughout those 27 games in June, the Rockies boasted 152 runs; conversely, they only surrendered 128 to their opponents. Despite the final outcome of their record that month, they did, however, suffer their longest losing streak of the season, an eight-game skid from June 22 to June 29.
Without playing a single NL West team that month, the Rockies fared pretty well in retrospect. They finished 2-2 in extra-inning games, and the bats heated up in their fair share of high-scoring affairs.
After losing the first game of June, they gave their fans something to get excited about just two days later with a come-from-behind, extra-innings 10-9 win over the Cincinnati Reds at Coors Field.
On that day, neither starting pitcher fared well. In just 4.1 innings, the Rockies’ Rodrigo Lopez gave up four runs off of eight hits, and the Reds’ Matt Belisle surrendered five off of 10 hits in 6.2 innings.
Heading into the bottom of the eighth, the Rockies were down 8-5, but a four-run eighth curbed the odds ever in their favor. In the ninth, the Reds tied it up again, only to set up the walk-off victory for the Rockies in 10.
Fast forward 10 days, after the Rockies had gone 4-3 in that time-frame. They were visiting the mighty Red Sox at the legendary Fenway Park, and had their opponents on their heels from the first inning on. After scoring a run in the first, followed by two in the second the Rockies never lost the lead.
In fact, after the third inning, the Red Sox stopped scoring altogether, but the Rockies kept rolling. They tacked on three more runs in the fifth, sixth and eighth innings each, and by that point, that was all she wrote. With Todd Helton’s four RBIs and Matt Holliday’s three runs off of three hits, the Rockies glided to an easy, 12-2 beat down of the team that would later get even.
Two days later, they did the exact same thing to Tampa Bay at home with another 12-2 victory. The win arrived with a milestone, as the Rockies finally broke the .500 barrier for their 34th win of the season in 67 games.
That, however, didn’t last long.
Ten days later, on June 25, they dropped a 10-9 decision to the Chicago Cubs in a heartbreaking fashion. At Wrigley Field that day, the Rockies got off on the wrong foot when, after scoring a single run in the top of the first, abandoned four runs to the Cubs just a half inning later. While the Cubs kept scoring single runs throughout many of the next seven innings, the Rockies could only muster two.
Then, they staged a comeback. In the top of the ninth, with the game on the line and just three outs to go, the Rockies scored six runs to regain the lead, if for only a short time. The Cubs only needed two in the bottom of the ninth to win, and that’s exactly what they did, walk-off style. The Rockies lost 10-9, despite two runs each from Kazuo Matsui, Brad Hawpe and Garrett Atkins.
By the end of that month, the Rockies sat at 39-42, but their slightly-better record in June foreshadowed what was to come just a few months down the road.
