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| Sunday, December 10 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hampton ready for Coors challenge ESPN.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
DALLAS -- Somebody has to pitch in Colorado. That's the rules.
And if you were going to design the perfect human being to pitch in Coors Field and live to tell about it, you would design Mike Hampton.
Not Rockies general manager Dan O'Dowd, the brilliant architect of this impossible dream. Not the 121 million skeptics who expect Hampton to turn into Greg Harris or Andy Ashby or one of the many other once-confident pitchers who crumbled under the trauma of the thin air in Colorado. After all, it was just eight months ago -- on April 28 -- that Hampton himself wandered to the mound at Coors, made his worst start of the season (seven runs, 11 baserunners in five innings) and then committed violent assault with intent to maim a defenseless dugout water cooler. That unfortunate incident didn't stand in the way of the Rockies allowing him to achieve massive personal wealth or anything. But it did doom Hampton to a life sentence of watching his water-cooler exploits being rerun on every sportscast in America. "I've got to work on that," Hampton quipped Saturday, after a press conference to announce his new deal. "Maybe get a deal with a water-cooler company or something. Or I could have like a quota -- one forearm bash every homestand." Ah, he can laugh now. But get back to us in six months. Or six years. Given Hampton's track record, he might still be laughing. But we've known many a pitcher who also loved those vistas of the snow-capped Rocky Mountain peaks -- until they gave up nine runs in 3 1/3 innings at Coors for the first time. And then they, too discovered that quality of ERA can start looming larger than quality of life. But if anyone has a chance to escape that Coors Curse, Mike Hampton is that anyone. And he has just enough Coors experience and just enough innate baseball intelligence to know what is and isn't possible. "I think my best games there are about seven innings, two runs, and I've had a few," Hampton said. "And I just really remember that, around the third inning, I noticed that my sinker wasn't affected by the light air at all. Now when I threw in the bullpen, I could see that my curve was not quite as sharp. But those were just adjustments I had to make as a visiting player. I think as I get a chance to pitch there on a regular basis, I can only get better." Now you have to admire that kind of optimism. But this was one day when optimism was ruled legal by even the U.S. Supreme Court. Why not ? For the Rockies, this was possibly the most optimistic day in franchise history. Hardly a day had gone by, in the 14 months O'Dowd has been GM of this team, that someone didn't tell him this was a lost cause -- that no matter how he structured his team on the field, he would never be able to attract enough decent pitching to win. So how the heck did he manage to reel in two of the six top free-agent pitchers on the market, in Hampton and Denny Neagle, in a span of four days? "I've been hearing that since the first day I took the job," O'Dowd said Saturday. "But we didn't back down from that. We know Mike Hampton likes challenges. But so do the people in this front office." So they fired nearly $175 million out there to Hampton and Neagle. And now they're chasing Darren Dreifort just as hard, with an offer believed to be six years, just upward of $60 million. O'Dowd knows he will take some heat about all these contracts, about all that money and about all those years he offered Hampton. But he wonders if the people dishing the heat will take into account the dollars he slashed from the payroll a year ago to give himself the ammunition to make these deals now. And he wonders if people will look at all the obstacles he faces in an attempt just to assemble a pitching staff. "We realize that in Colorado, we have to do things different than most people," O'Dowd said. "We can't live in a vacuum. I know that most of the other offers were for seven years, and ours was for eight. But in the big picture, I don't think it came down to years. I really don't." And O'Dowd is one of those guys who never stops looking at the big picture, whether the grumblers buy his vision or not. Originally, the Rockies were preparing a big run at Manny Ramirez. Then O'Dowd actually commissioned a study on teams that have won the World Series in the free-agent era. He rated those teams' payroll expenditures with a number scale, by position. And when his study was complete, he realized the last thing he needed to do was plow a giant chunk of his payroll into just two corner outfielders -- Ramirez and Larry Walker. "What we found is that the teams that won devoted a large percentage of their payroll to center field, second base, shortstop, starting pitching and closer," he said. "If you looked at those positions and they didn't add up to a certain number, you don't win." So he saved up his pennies -- about a billion of them, in fact -- and did what needed to be done, even though most people said it couldn't be done. Now it's up to Hampton in particular to prove that the impossible is more possible than his pitching forefathers made it appear. "It's a test," he said. "But Tom Glavine has pitched a couple of shutouts at Coors. There's been a no-hitter. That's proof it can be done. I've just got to find the formula. And I look forward to doing that." But now it can be told: What he's really looking forward to is hitting at Coors. He joked about whether it would "be as big a deal if it's me chasing .400 as it was with Todd Helton?" (Hmm. He might be surprised.) Now all he needs is about 400 pinch-hit at-bats and he can make history. "Dang," he said. "I knew we left something out of that contract." Then he shouted out to his agent, Mark Rodgers: "Hey, Mark. You forgot something -- that pinch-hit quota." Oh, well. He'll just have to settle for those snow-capped mountain peaks. Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. | ALSO SEE Hampton, Rockies agree on Mile High mega-deal Stark: Winter meetings update AUDIO/VIDEO   Mike Hampton addresses the issue of pitching in Coors Field.wav: 124 k RealAudio: 14.4 | 28.8 | 56.6 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
