Go East, Young Rockies.
Or south. Or southeast. Whatever. Just get the living daylights out of the National League West. Move the heck out of the same division as the Dodgers, Giants and Padres.
It’s extremely rare that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred says something that the baseball guys on the Grading The Week (GTW) staff agree with. It’s even more rare when Manfred gives us a snippet actual, genuine hope to cling to.
But the commish, in a passing as rare as Edmond Halley’s comet, somehow managed to give us both at the start of the week. Manfred said during ESPN’s broadcast of the Little League Classic this past Sunday that if expansion was on the table for baseball (and it is), then realignment would have to be, too.
“I think if we expand,” Manfred noted, “it provides us with an opportunity to geographically realign.”
To that, Team GTW has only two words: Amen and hallelujah.
Rockies being “realigned” out of NL West — A.
The baseball guys won’t lie: GTW has been rooting for expansion for a long time. Largely because we knew it also meant realignment — and short of new ownership, which isn’t happening, realignment might be the quickest path to the Rockies becoming relevant again.
Or not being as historically terrible, at any rate.
Now first off, we know this would inconvenience the thousands of Dodgers fans in the metro, the ones who love to turn Coors Field blue a gazillion times a year.
Yeah, well, tough.
Same for Giants Nation, or whatever you call yourselves these days. And you bandwagon Padres fans. And the three guys we know from down the street who used to live in Chandler, Ariz., and drive to Diamondbacks games twice a year.
Nothing personal. Honest. It’s just that the Rockies need a radical refresh in the worst way possible right now.
And besides the Monforts firing themselves (which, again, isn’t happening) or promoting more family members into more crucial decision-making roles (which will no doubt happen again), the best way to see that refresh through is a change of divisional neighbors.
If you’re a Rockies fan, you should be rooting for a division that features the White Sox or Twins. Or the Rangers and Astros. Or the Royals and just about anybody.
Dick Monfort’s latest punch line is insisting that a salary cap is the quickest way for his Rox to catch the Dodgers’ evil empire. Nonsense. Monfort couldn’t catch Los Angeles if he was riding shotgun in one of Richard Branson’s rockets.
The Rockies as of last Friday ranked 21st among MLB clubs in total payroll, per Spotrac.com. The Dodgers were first. The Padres were fourth. The D-backs were 13th; the Giants, 14th.
No, the purple and black need to be moved to a baseball block that’s more in their, shall we say, tax bracket. More games with the Royals (No. 18 payroll), White Sox (No. 29), Athletics (No. 28), Guardians (No. 25) or Twins (No. 20).
Yes, you, too, can learn to love the American League, Denver. Just ask Astros fans. Besides, with Manfred making the DH universal and balancing the schedule, the idea of “American” and “National” leagues, save for founding franchises, is becoming more arbitrary by the summer.
With Kansas City, the proximity thing is obvious. So is a potential rivalry for two franchises with historically gorgeous ballparks and perennially tortured fan bases. Hey, we could even create an I-70 Cup or something. Loser get an all-expenses-paid weekend in Wichita.
So bring on a new franchise in Portland. Or Salt Lake City. Anything that pushes Denver eastward on a baseball map. Anything that inches them away from the interminable Hellscape of the present.
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