May 12- Colorado Rockies

The Colorado Rockies are on of the youngest teams currently playing in Major League Baseball and unfortunately with that there isn’t much of a history between them and anyone who has served their country in the United States military. By this I mean that none of the players who have ever donned the black and purple were ever enlisted in the service. For the past two nights this has become a bit of a road block, one of which will fade away as time goes on and when I start talking about the teams who have been around prior to 1950. As it stands now I merely have to work with the games the Rockies have played which happen to fall on Memorial Day.

Two moments in the Rockies’ past have shown a great tribute to the troops who served in the past and present. On May 28, 2007 the Rockies gave away free to anyone who served in the armed services that showed up in uniform, which was also met with a pre-game celebration of their patriotism. On May 31, 2010 the Rockies hosted and recognized distinguished hero Donald G. Stratton, one of 22 USS Arizona survivors, guests of the Freedom Service Dogs organization, and Military Order of the Purple Heart. Stratton, born outside Inavale, Nebraska on July 14, 1922, graduated in 1940 and joined the U.S. Navy that October. After training, he was assigned aboard USS Arizona BB39 as a member of the 6th Division, which set sail for Hawaii on January 23, 1941. On December 7, 1941 he was on board as torpedoes, dive bombers and high altitude bombers pummeled the ship. After Arizona was hit by an 88-KG armor-piercing bomb that blew off 100 feet of the bow, he and five other sailors completed a 70-foot hand-to-hand crawl across a line connected to a sister ship, The Vestal, in order to survive. Stratton had been badly burned - 70 percent of his body - and he was taken to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Pearl Harbor. Eventually medically discharged in September 1942 and having returned to Red Cloud, Nebraska, he re-enlisted and went to sea aboard U.S.S. Stack (DD406) for a tour on the South Seas. In short, Stratton is kind of an American badass.

As of 2012 the Rockies’ record on Memorial Day sits at 13-8. This last season they played and won both ends of a doubleheader against the Houston Astros at Coors Field which will help make better sense as to why they’ve played 21 games in their 20-year existence. While they truly haven’t played enough years in the league to show any real patter of note I can only piece together and interesting tale based on my own findings and conclusions which pertain more to the game the Rockies played against the St. Louis Cardinals this afternoon in their 8-2 victory.

4-3: As I mentioned a moment ago the Rockies played the Cardinals this afternoon, at which Rockies pitcher Jorge De La Rosa had a no-hitter going through 6 1/3 innings until David Freese smoked a hard grounder by Rockies first baseman Jordan Pacheco. De La Rosa had a high pitch count going for him and he was removed shortly after giving up a second hit to John Jay. At the time the Rockies were up 5-0 thanks in part to a Troy Tulowitzki three-run homer in the third inning. With the win under his belt De La Rosa’s record moved to 4-3 on the season; however, this, oddly enough, is not why I marked my cap with that record. Come to think of it until I started writing this piece I never realized what De La Rosa’s record was, which makes this article all the more interesting.

In the 21 games that the Rockies have played on Memorial Day the one team they played the most has been the Cardinals. Their first meeting came on May 29, 1995 in which the Rockies fell to the Cardinals in 11 innings by the score of 6-5. Over the next three seasons the Rockies would come out the victors, winning handily by at least two runs in each contest. It would be another seven years (2005) before the teams met up again on Memorial Day, this time with the Cardinals, once again winning by one run (5-4). In 2007 the match went back to Colorado by a score of 6-2, and in 2011 the Cardinals once again beat the Rockies by a one-run differential (4-3).

Now, if you’re playing at home and tallying up the numbers you’ll see that the Cardinals can only beat the Rockies by one run on Memorial Day, but more important, the overall record is 4-3 in favor of the Rockies. 4-3, once again is Jorge De La Rosa’s record as of today after beating the Cardinals. Pretty weird if you ask me.