Colorado Rockies: When The Fans Cheer for the Other Team

Hey San Diego Chargers, the Colorado Rockies feel your pain.

Watching Thursday Night Football, many camera shots showed a sea of orange in the stands for the Chargers taking on the Denver Broncos … in San Diego. That orange isn’t hard to miss as you can see in this photo.

Sure I’m mixing my sports here, but it reminded me a lot of quite a few Rockies games this season. Ask Rockies fans and they will tell you there were too many times that the other team was cheered pretty darn loud after getting a win. There were times that the other team’s fans were generating two-strike noise … inside Coors Field against the Rockies.

Seeing that orange in a visiting stadium reminded me of way too many times that San Francisco Giants fans take over 20^th and Blake. It happens, San Diego. We get it. Been there. Done that.

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We get it … but it doesn’t mean that we like it. We get that it’s from not putting up enough wins to keep the casual fans interested. We get that the Broncos are woven into the fabric of Denver while the Rockies were called “an excuse for a picnic” recently by Mark Kiszla of The Denver Post.

For those of us covering the Rockies, we’re eagerly anticipating the start of 2017 season. The return of Trevor Story. The evolution of Jon Gray. The next chapter in the legacies of Charlie Blackmon and DJ LeMahieu. The continued ascent of Nolan Arenado to the game’s highest peaks. The next steps for Tyler Anderson, David Dahl and so many young players.

Even with all of that, however, it’s still going to take some time (and some wins) before the Coors Field stands are actually filled with a majority of Rockies fans and not the supporters of the other team.

Recently when I was in the Bahamas, I was amazed by the number of staff members at our resort who heard I lived in Colorado and then proceeded to tell me how they loved the Broncos. I have a feeling that, two years ago, they were all big Seattle Seahawks fans as well. People love a winner, right?

Winning draws fans to the game. The diehards may sit around and grumble about the “bandwagon fans” but at least they’re there and it finally feels like a home-field advantage.

Denver fans saw first-hand last night at Qualcomm Stadium what it looked like for the home team to have to play in front of a mass of visiting fans. Here’s hoping they remember that next season when the Rockies take the field.

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We recently had a roundtable discussion about if Denver would ever be a baseball town. The truth is that it will be … when the Rockies win. Here’s hoping that’s next season and Coors Field can be covered (sooner than later) in purple rather than orange, blue or red.