For the Rockies, a numbers game.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: Sports Biz

NOTHING SATISFIES A SPORTS FAN'S INNER CAVEMAN like football, a game that features spectacular collisions, powerful athletes grunting to advance a ball wrapped in a dead pig's hide, and fans festooned with war paint.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

And then there's baseball. What other sport meshes so perfectly with the urge to buy a graphing calculator? It's a game that lays bare our statistical stirrings, a sport that supports a view of humanity as nothing more than a coincidental mash of protoplasm relentlessly pursuing, like a lemming to the sea, some sliver of understanding about the relationship between runs scored and slugging percentage vs. left-handed pitching.

What other sport could produce such scholarly works as "Implicit Linear Weights in Run Estimators," a subject tackled recently by the Society for American Baseball Research?

In celebration of spring, and in appreciation of baseball's unique appeal to the Alan Greenspan-part of our brains, we'll contribute to baseball's body of statistical knowledge with a fresh take on the 2006 Colorado Rockies from an economic perspective.

As the season begins, here are some of the telling statistics that will determine the health of Charlie Monfort's bank account a year from now.

2 to 1.91 million. The ratio between the estimated height of the grass (in inches) at Coors Field during the 2005 season and the number of tickets sold over 81 regular-season home games. According to a Denver Post report, the Rockies' lawn-maintenance crew has been instructed to maintain the grass again this season at a slightly elevated level--the better to prevent screaming line-drive singles from becoming screaming line-drive triples to the corner. A slight inflationary creep in lawn height coupled with the Rockies' increasing tendency to place groundball-inducing starting pitchers on the mound could temper opposing team scores enough to produce an improvement in the win-loss ratio, which might produce an ensuing positive impact on ...

Single-game ticket sales. Last year 15,000 season-ticket holders accounted for about 1.2 million of the reported 1.91 million regular-season attendees at Coors Field. Monfort is hopeful of coming within sniffing distance of 2.5 million total attendance in 2006--a lofty goal that would return the Rockies to the upper 50 percent of MLB teams. Even if season-ticket sales rise to a hoped-for 17,000, that will leave a gap of close to 1 million seats that must be filled by single-game patrons...