High on The Rockies

By RICHARD CORLISS

What is the sound of 100,000 feet stomping? Like an avalanche rumble, like T. rexes jogging, like a subway roaring through your bedroom. You hear that sound a lot -- you feel it in the fillings of your teeth -- at Denver's Mile High Stadium. The thunder begins in the dollar seats in left center, then spreads like the flu until the place seems ready to implode.

The Colorado Rockies must be in town.

! The new team may be twentysomething games out of first place in the National League West, but it is has won the hearts of Rocky Mountain fans. They make this secular hajj all around the region to help the club obliterate attendance records: a million fans by Mother's Day, 2 million by Father's Day, a projected precedental 4.5 million for the season.

Hard-traveling fandom has become a benign regional contagion. Loren and Tancy Frank packed up the Chevy Caprice last Sunday, drove the 550 miles from Laurel, Montana, checked into a Holiday Inn, walked over to the Rockies' gate, and bought tickets for back-to-back games against the other expansion team, the Florida Marlins. "Neither of us had ever been to a major-league game before," Tancy observes, "so we said, 'Why not?' " They'll be back. So will Karen Harris, who "wanted to see what all the ruckus was about" and motored in from Wiggins, Colorado, 65 miles away. "Besides," says her husband Craig, "there's nothing to do in Wiggins." Maybe things are quiet in Chadron, Nebraska, too: a farmer there is a regular long-distance commuter to Mile High. After eight hours a day of riding atop his tractor, a Rockies executive heard the farmer say, five hours in his Cadillac feels like a breeze.

The faithful have tailgate parties in the parking lot and a concert of Rockies foot stompin' inside -- especially when the team approaches competence. Rightfielder Dante Bichette strikes out but reaches first base when the catcher drops the ball, and receives an ovation. The infield turns a creaky double play, making the putout on .057-batting pitcher Charlie Hough, and the crowd cheers as if Babe Ruth had just gone oh-fer. "All that noise they make gives me an adrenaline boost," says Bichette. "You don't want to embarrass yourself in front of 60,000 fans." First baseman Andres Galarraga, the Venezuelan whose dimpled charisma is the club's handsomest calling card, takes the crowd fervor like medicine. "You can feel tired all day and don't feel good," he says, "but when you come to the stadium and start hearing all that sound, it picks me up a lot."

It surely buoys the Rockies' owners, led by trucking magnate Jerry McMorris. Three years ago, it seemed a risky prospect to pay $95 million for a new team in a small market. So the owners cried poor and extracted a sweetheart deal from Denver, which owns Mile High Stadium. This year and next, the Rockies pay no rent or maintenance and keep 40% of all concession sales, worth at least $ $10 million. They also have a pinchpenny player payroll, at $8.7 million the lowest in the majors.

Lovable losers is the role expansion teams in their teething years are typecast for, and at first the Rockies were all that and more. For veteran clubs a date with the Rockies was a license to steal. Also hit, score and humiliate. Twenty-two times opposing teams have batted around within an inning. Six times Colorado has lost by 10 or more runs. The frayed pitching staff struggles to keep its earned-run average below the dreaded Pezzullo Line (named for "Pretzels" Pezzullo, a Phillies lefthander in the '30s whose lifetime ERA was a bulbous 6.36). "I'm impatient," says manager Don Baylor. "I expect a lot more out of my players. Right now people are happy to have baseball in this town, win or lose. But that will change."

The team is changing already; the Rockies are starting to give their jovial fans something to stomp about. Galarraga leads the National League with a batting average near the sacred .400. Tyros like Bichette, Vinny Castilla and Eric Young are among the league leaders in stolen bases, doubles and triples (but not home runs, which were expected to fly through Denver's lean air like milkweed). Third baseman Charlie Hayes, discarded by the New York Yankees, has amassed swankier stats than his Bronx replacement, $5 million All-Star Wade Boggs. Last week rookie Curt Laskanic capped Colorado's three- game sweep of the Marlins and earned a standing ovation by pitching 6 2/3 innings of one-hit ball. Headiest of all, the team is suddenly competitive. Since Memorial Day, when they had won only 14 of their first 50 games, the Rockies have been playing .500 ball.

With success come other inevitabilities of baseball life: players' demands for fatter contracts (Galarraga now earns a pauperish $600,000), a hot-stove winter of fan expectations this green team may not be able to satisfy. And wait until '95, when the Rockies move into their new stadium. It will seat only 45,000, some 12,000 less than this year's average per-game attendance.

All right, all clubs should have such problems. "This region is looking for heroes," says Baylor. Thanks to his team, an entire time zone has contracted Rocky Mountain spotted baseball fever. It is as intense as first love. And much noisier.

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/Denver