Rivalry

The only sport that I've given more than a passing glance over the past year is baseball. My Rockies have been holding their own in a tight division and I've been keeping regular tabs on Ublado Jimenez's impressive record of delivering ridiculous gas (not a fart joke; I don't follow him that closely).

When I moved, I swapped scenery within the division and continue to reside in an NL West city. While I'm razzed with semi-regularity for being a Rockies fan, I'm a little surprised that the only time people seem to give a shit about my preferred squad is when the Rockies are playing the Giants. Even then, Giants fans are pretty much just going through the motions and hating the opposing team. There exists no real rivalry until the wild card race but it's still just Giants versus The Other Guys. It doesn't feel special.

Compare that to the Giants/Dodgers rivalry and it's night and day. Dodgers fans are despised in SF and Giants fans are loathed in LA. You can smell blood in the air when the Dodgers come to town. Not even the Crips will wear blue when the Giants are battling their cursed challengers from the south.

I guess it makes sense that the two teams would hate each other so much. They played in rival Burroughs in New York until 1958 and were subsequently relocated to rival cities within the state of California. It's only natural that old animosities would follow the teams westward and that new ones wouldn't take too long to form given how much the top and bottom halves of this fine state feel about one another. These are the ingredients for the longest standing rivalry in baseball.

Granted the Rockies have only existed for 17 years, but they need a real rival. They need an adversary so hated that each team's fans can have reason to burn shit down in each other's cities. It just makes for a more exciting summer when a game that counts as less than 1% of the regular season sends everyone into a tizzy.

It's not like Denver doesn't already have a long history of sports related animosity. Just ask any Avs fan about the Red Wings or any Bronco fan about the Raiders. You'll get an earful of so much verbal diarrhea you'll need an entire box of Q-tips to swab out the hate.

Maybe it's because I don't live there any more and won't have to deal with the ramifications of rubber bullets, molotov cocktails, missing teeth and rivers of vomit, but I feel like the Rockies are due a few celebratory/retaliatory riots every summer just to keep things interesting until ski season starts.