I'd like to thank my friends at Can't Stop the Bleeding. While ridiculing Woody Paige yesterday for calling Denver, during his "Around the Horn" appearance, quote "a good baseball town," they singled me out apparently as the one good baseball fan in the city. Well, thanks, I appreciate it, and I also would like to thank all of the visitors from Metsblog for their kind words while I am at it. Of course, I don't live in Denver, I live in Boulder, which is actually a great baseball town what with all of the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs fans who have come west from their flat homelands to ski, rock climb, and take advantage of the world-class curriculum at the University of Colorado. I was in a sports bar in Boulder Sunday night during the capper of that over-the-top Red Sox-Yankees series, and the place was packed to the walls with loud and enthusiastic partisans for both sides. If the Rockies were ever any good, I bet a lot of these kids would go to games more than once or twice in their college careers.

Right after accepting accolades for being apparently the lone shining light in the vast hardball wasteland that is the Rocky Mountain states, you'll now have to excuse me if I take the rest of this New York series off from being a Rockies fan. The NBA playoffs are really compelling right now, high-def hockey is totally resurrecting the obsessive puck monkey in me I thought Bill Wirtz had killed off years ago, and I honestly can't bear to watch another dull one-sided beatdown like the fiasco last night. Let's face it, there are championship contenders, playoff teams, and also-rans, and even in April we know which group the Mets are in and which group the Rockies find themselves once again pacing. At least we didn't spend $300 million in the offseason to get to this point.

Update: With LaTroy Hawkins now going on the disabled list, there remain only three active bullpen pitchers from the group that broke camp with the Rockies. Taylor Buchholz went to the rotation and Hawkins, Byung-Hyun Kim, and Ramon Ramirez all got hurt. The current group Clint Hurdle has at his disposal consists of Jeremy Affeldt, Brian Fuentes, and Tom Martin from the left side and Zach McClellan, Ryan Speier, Bobby Keppel, and Manuel Corpas from the right. Since this happens every year, why do the Rockies continue spending money on free agents like Hawkins and Jose Mesa who are inevitably ineffective on the rare occasions when they do pitch? The young guys are going to get to play no matter what, so you might as well give them a vote of confidence by giving them first crack at it. I suppose Colorado is still gun-shy from the first six weeks of 2005, when an all-kid bullpen featuring Speier, Scott Dohmann, and Chin-Hui Tsao caused the night sky over Coors to get lit up like the end of Return of the Jedi.