The Colorado Rockies are a Body-Horror Nightmare

In the '80s, when the Replacements were writing maybe twenty percent of that decade's best songs and apotheosizing slacker culture, they were said to have a morbid, expectation-managing in-joke: one would call "Where are we headed?" and get the response "To the middle—the very middle!" In a cynical, careerist environment like trying to play rock and roll for money, this corrosive parody of the standard "We're Going to the Top" mantra served as armor for the band. That's the useful thing about real life: it's okay to admit that you're not really trying to hit a home run every single time. The Replacements never did hit it big, which they were probably completely ambivalent about. At times, the baseball team in Colorado has seemed a lot like a certain track off the  Mats' album "Let It Be" because of the levels of dissatisfaction they've inspired.

In 1993, Major League Baseball dropped a team off in Denver, and there was much rejoicing. In the early days of the Colorado Rockies, they set attendance records right and left—helped by playing in a football stadium, to be sure, but it's not like that works for the A's—and, in 1995, in only their third season, they even made the postseason. At the time, the team considered itself to have a mammoth rivalry with the Atlanta Braves, who beat them in the National League Divisional Series that year. If you can find a Braves fan, ask her about that famous Colorado Rockies rivalry, and be prepared to say "No, seriously: in Denver, there totally was a rivalry. Everybody talked about it all the time." One reason nobody remembers this rivalry is that the Braves followed that series win with a World Series win, and then nine consecutive trips to the postseason. The Rockies followed the series loss with a trip to Arby's (Ed. Note: Unconfirmed), and 11 Royals-like seasons where they finished with a winning record a Romney-esque three times, never coming close to postseason play.

Most of those years, though, the team was likable. They didn't win much, but they mostly stayed out of the basement, and they sure hit a lot, and everybody was comfortable with their place in the mix. Early-days stalwarts like Andres "the Big Cat" Galarraga, Dante "one-time thing" Bichette, and Larry "from Canada" Walker, gave way to Todd Helton's ridiculous home numbers and perfectly cromulent away numbers, who in turn yielded pride of place to current stars Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez, who: take home just under thirty percent of the team's payroll; have led this year's team to today's perfectly palindromic 47-74 record, tied with the Texas Rangers for worst in baseball; will not be playing again this season. Tulowitzki has been there, done that: even his Wikipedia page notes he's "prone to injuries as he has averaged just 117 games played per season since his rookie campaign in 2007." But what's happened to Carlos Gonzalez may be unprecedented in the annals of "Holy SHIT what's going on with this poor fucker's body?" This year he's lost his appendix—okay, fine: that could happen to anybody, no big deal—he's got tendinitis in his knee, which is also super-common, if a pretty major bummer for a pro athlete, and, earlier this season, his finger…did things.

Here's a quick series of evocative phrases from the team's trainer, Keith Dugger, from a story that came out at the time:

"a growth was found beneath the sheath around the muscle."

Keith Dugger: underrated poet of body horror.

"We're still not sure (what it is). But it's a type of tumor within the sheath of the finger. There's a hard substance underneath it. We're going to do a biopsy on it."

"They are common."

Uh, Mr. Dugger? Side point before we move on: do you mind if we pause so I can shriek in terror?

"These little benign tumors—which we hope it is—are probably the second-most-common finding in a finger besides cysts."

The second-most-common…finding…in a finger. Okay. I hope the first is, shit, I don't know. A pony? A shiny dime? A sense that everything's going to be okay some day? Back to you, Mr. Dugger:

"The doctor is tending to head toward maybe what we call a neuroma, kind of a scarring around a nerve — a big bundle around there, a wad of some sort."

A…big bundle. A…a wad. A wad of some sort.

"Also there was a vascular component."

Also there was a vascular component. Can we go now?

"So there's a possibility he had a vessel that popped from the original swelling that he had, and maybe it calcified up and hardened. We won't know until the biopsy."

Keith Dugger is now the sports consultant for legendary holy-shit-did-you-see-THAT? film director David Cronenberg. (Ed. Note: Citation needed.) So that's the kind of season Carlos Gonzalez has had, and, as noted, 47-74 is the kind of season the Rockies were having even before shutting down Gonzalez and Tulowitzki this week. In the words of the titular Big Lebowski, "the plane…has hit…the mountain." The once-reliable offensive production is gone, as the team's managed 561 runs on the year, while giving up 635. By winning percentage, this is their worst season yet: the team has lost their hold on the middle, and there's not much fun in guessing whether or not they'll win more games than they did in the strike-shortened 1994 season. It's sports, not life, so they're supposed to be trying, trying all the time, and they don't really appear to be tanking. They appear to just be bad, unlucky, unhealthy, and maybe doomed. If it were a Cronenberg movie, there'd be a reason to watch the nastiness to the very end, but it's just sports. It's okay to avert your eyes.

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