I wasn't sure what to write about the game Sunday. It's hard to gauge how to react to games like that. Here the Rockies are on the brink of proving themselves irrelevant before the first month of the season is out, and they pull out a win like that, with an unassisted triple play and then a walk-off extra inning homer for good measure. A lot of people who know I have Rockies tickets called to ask if I went to the game on Sunday. No, I went to the game on Saturday, the one where the team eked out two runs from ten hits. I've been to several games and every time I've seen the real Rockies, the not-ready-for-prime-time group that just isn't consistent enough in any phase of the game to win with any regularity. They have players that are capable of being exciting on sporadic isolated occasions as Troy Tulowitzki and Matt Holliday were this weekend to save Colorado from an embarrassing home sweep. They're not yet an exciting team, and flashes of hope like this are all that are going to sustain we the proud few in 2007.

What I ended up doing was writing nothing in the wake of the very strange game Sunday and letting normality return in the form of a blandly routine loss to the recently hot Giants in San Francisco yesterday. Another day, another NL West road defeat. The defense was bad, the starting pitching was bad, the bullpen was bad. When Colorado gets everybody healthy and puts Willy Taveras out to pasture later this season, they will be a little less reliably terrible than they are right now. But their upside, as I wrote before the season began, is still one of an 80-win team, not a division winner. Without health, luck, or the pressure of their jobs playing upon the manager and the GM, the Rockies are exactly as their record suggests -- one of the worst teams in the National League. As usual. But the key to the triple play, and the walkoff homer, and the reason to keep watching Colorado baseball this year, is the whole secret to baseball's greatness itself. They play a lot of games. It's a long season, and you're bound to see a few things you've never seen before if you pay attention.