Nolan Arenado Went 5-For-6 With 3 Home Runs And Rockies Fans Couldn't Even Watch It
Nolan’s 1 of 5 players in @MLB history with a cycle, walk-off HR & 3-HR game in the same season. Others?
Brett. DiMaggio. Foxx. Williams pic.twitter.com/sYbAsBeDY5
— Colorado Rockies (@Rockies) July 20, 2017
You can probably already guess what angle I’m going to take here. I’m a big proponent of MLB making more of a concerted effort to market their star players. In fairness, I think they’ve been showing signs of figuring that out to an extent. An example of that being that they had Gary Sanchez in the Home Run Derby over Logan Morrison, who deserved it more, but Sanchez is the player that fans paid to see. In this particular case though, it broke my heart the last time that I wrote about Nolan Arenado, and I had somebody in the comments say something like, “I had never heard of this guy until I saw him on the blog, and wow! He’s great!”
MLB, you have a problem when there are baseball fans who are just now finding out about Arenado and how great he is. I put Paul Goldschmidt on that same list, too. I think Arenado is at least starting to gain a little bit more visibility, but Goldschmidt is criminally, CRIMINALLY underrated, underappreciated and underexposed by the league. That’s a separate argument, though. As it pertains to Arenado, he went 5-for-6 yesterday with three home runs, scored four runs, and amassed 14 total bases. The three home runs, 14 total bases, and five hits all set new career highs for Arenado, while his seven runs driven in tied a career high. That’s great! But nobody in Colorado got to see it.
AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain (known until this season as Root Sports), the Rockies’ broadcast partner, televises just 150 of their games per year, and this one didn’t make the cut. That’s the second fewest in the majors, ahead of only the hapless Reds, whose fans are probably grateful to take 13 days off from watching their race for the first pick in the 2018 draft. Colorado, on the other hand, is on pace to win 94 games and make the postseason for the first time in nearly a decade—FanGraphs gives them more than a 65% chance of October baseball; Baseball Prospectus is even more generous, at more than 75%.
Colorado is 8th in the majors in average attendance this year (37,220). The Rockies are good, their fans know it, and they don’t have to wait until the postseason to latch onto their team to enjoy the ride like what happens in other markets (cough, Cleveland, cough). TV contracts are what they are and the league isn’t exactly to blame for this game not being televised in Colorado’s broadcasting market, but I can’t even imagine how pissed off I’d be if all of my team’s games weren’t broadcasted in my area, and then my team’s superstar went off and had the best day at the plate that he’s ever had in his entire life.
One of my favorite childhood memories was watching Nomar Garciaparra hit three home runs, two of which were grand slams, and drive in ten runs in one night. If you’re a 10-year-old growing up in Denver, and you catch what Arenado did on TV yesterday, there’s a good chance you’ve just become an Arenado fan for life because that performance is superhero shit to little kids. Instead, the game wasn’t on TV, and no kids watched the highlights on ESPN because all of the highlight shows got replaced by egomaniacs yelling at each other all morning.
Not to make a negative out of a positive, because I think the main point to hammer home here is that Arenado is a very special player, and yesterday was proof of that, but even as a non-Rockies fan, it’s frustrating to hear that his performance wasn’t shown on television screens in the Rockies’ broadcasting area.