Go Rockies! At least for now

Two hours to go before the Rockies game.
Yeah, I’m watching.
Yeah, I’m excited.
Yeah, I’m on the bandwagon.
I never thought I would be a bandwagon fan. I’ve been loyal to the Kansas Jayhawks and the Kansas City Chiefs (almost to a fault there) for many years. I was a baseball fan, too, for many years, to the point where I used to be able to tell you who finished 10th in the MVP race in 1984.
But I lost interest in baseball as the Kansas City Royals continued to turn in awful, terrible, no-good-very-bad seasons. And I became disenchanted when it wasn’t entirely the Royals fault they were bad. The Royals, as a small market team, didn’t have the $893 million other teams, like the Yankees, could spend on players. Heck, the Royals could barely afford the guy flipping burgers at McDonald’s.
As I began climbing mountains in earnest and added kids to my life, I barely have time for the sports I love, let alone the ones I don’t usually follow. So I made a deal with myself. I would follow the Avalanche, the Rockies and the Nuggets by reading the stories every day in the paper, and if the team warranted it, I would start to give them more of my time.
I was, in other words, willing to be a loyal fan if the team earned my time.
Some call this being a bandwagon fan. That’s true. My good friend Jared Fiel, who is such a Rockies nut he wrote a column Monday about how the games may be causing him chest pains, calls me a “Rockies Observer.” I’m OK with that as well.
I won’t have the right to brag about staying with the team through the years if they do win the World Series. But I might buy a T-shirt.
So I feel a tiny bit funny cheering so hard for the Rockies now. But, heck, I enjoyed the Avalanche’s Stanley Cup season (as well as the many when they made the playoffs). And Monday’s game was one of the greatest baseball games I’ve seen. It was fun for me to enjoy a team in postseason play again. That hasn’t happened to me since 1985.
There were more than 50,000 at that game, too. Three weeks ago, when the Rockies started their winning streak that got them into the playoffs, I don’t think there were 15,000 at the game.
So I may be a bandwagon fan. But I don’t suspect I’m alone either.


P.S. Two links you might find of interest:

• This is PokerTube, a site I recently discovered that puts poker shows up. I missed taping "High Stakes Poker" and was thrilled to discover it in full form on this site, edited with the commercials out. I don't know how this site gets away with that, but I'm loving it. I'm probably late the game on this as usual, but I don't know if I'll ever watch GSN's poker show on my TV again.

• I wrote a story on some of my favorite bloggers for Pokerworks. Yours too probably. It's not one of my best works but I enjoyed doing it, and the guys (and it was all guys for this story) gave me some great answers to my mundane questions.