From a rocky past to the World Series.

• Author: Cote, Mike
• Position: COTE'S COLORADO

The night before the Rockies clinched a spot in the World Series, a bar patron looked up at a TV screen and pondered aloud what had been on the minds of newly minted baseball fans across Colorado for more than a month.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"Where did this team come from?"

Catcher Yorvit Torrealba had just hit a three-run homer at a cold, rain-sodden Coors Field to break a tie with the Arizona Diamondbacks to put the Colorado Rockies up 4-1, clinching the team's third straight win in the National League pennant series.

You already know what happened the following evening: pandemonium.

Forgive those of us who joined the Rockies bandwagon just in time to ride it to the World Series. For the first time in the team's 15-year history, it has one.

Even if the Rockies winning streak has finally come up short by the time you're reading this, it's been a wild, joyful ride. From a bunch of unknowns who could fill the stadium only for fireworks celebrations to World Series contenders who battle in front of sellout crowds.

"I think we're still being introduced," ace pitcher Jeff Francis told the New York Times after the team clinched the World Series berth. "I think it will always be Yankees/Red Sox in Major League Baseball. But there's no reason a team like us can't come in and take baseball by storm."

A World Series race means serious money for the Rockies organization and a dance on the national stage just as Denver is preparing to host the Democratic National Convention next summer. The Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau, citing a study from a previous World Series, put the local economic payoff at $2.4 million to $5 million per home game.

So much for Rockies owners Charlie and Dick Monfort being the "most reviled, despised, maligned, smeared and slandered businessmen in the Rocky Mountain region this side of Joe Nachio."

That's how David Lewis and Eric Peterson began their cover story on the Monfort brothers and their stewardship of the Rockies, "Owning up to a rocky past," in the September issue of ColoradoBiz. And it was barely hyperbole.

When we featured the Monforts on the cover, we could have chosen an image that depicted the brothers smiling. But we opted for a look that suggested defiance, because at that moment, the Monforts had few defenders for their fiscally conservative business plan, the one that relied on bringing...