This time, luck can't sneak up on Rockies

ShareThis

The next step for the Colorado Rockies is as unfamiliar as was the last step. Think of it as the stunned leading the astonished.By now the reality of the World Series seems more real. When it was actually happening it seemed surreal, and the Rox did play it as if in a dream, nice little sleepwalkers for the grand and moneyed Red Sox.Yet, it is still uncertain how it happened, and it is almost time to make it happen again.Baseball has no blueprint, no reliable design in any case, even if money is the usual recipe. The Rockies are as likely to overspend as they are to overwhelm, and if the rest of the National League is not noticeably trembling, it is redecorating.The Dodgers get brand-name manager Joe Torre, the Diamondbacks improve their pitching with All-Star Dan Haren, the Padres take a chance on Mark Prior and the Giants relieve themselves of Barry Bonds, maybe the greatest move of them all. And that's just the West.The Rockies do reward shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, as smart a move as it is obvious. Buying leadership, performance and toughness does not require any special shopping skills.Plus, there is the publicity advantage of breaking into a new level of reward in one so young as Tulowitzki, making the Rockies seem generous and perceptive when they are, in fact, merely practical and realistic.To keep Matt Holliday away from window-shopping with an arbitration -- avoiding incentive is a sound choice.Yet the total money paid to the pair of them (about $53 million) is about the same as it cost the Red Sox just to be allowed to talk with Daisuke Matsuzaka.Whatever is yet done with Garrett Atkins and Brad Hawpe and Brian Fuentes, the Rockies payroll will not climb into the outrageous. The Rockies are doing no more than they must to give themselves a better chance than they had going into last year's spring training.One thing has not changed, and that is the Rockies are working to change the popular impression of them. This time, it is to prove that what happened last year was not a fluke, that they are as good as they were.In other seasons, it has been to show they are better than expectations, worth more than the usual last-place finish, better than a perpetual foot wipe, a real baseball team and not a sideshow at altitude that needs to keep its baseballs in a humidor.Surely, it is better to have to live up to something than down to something, but to think that the Rockies can do again what they did in the same way they did it is absurd, especially since no one had done it like that before.The complete flukiness of the Rockies' tale might be at the root of the current strategy, which is to do as little as possible and trust that lady fortune has not lost the address of Coors Field.Hanging around until the middle of September and then refusing to lose is not exactly a foolproof scheme, baseball being a game where tomorrows march leisurely through wins, losses and rainouts.The planets won't always align and the umpires won't be conveniently blind and pennant winners can't play from ambush. It is a serious thing to be taken seriously, as the Rockies now must be taken.And recent baseball history is against the Rockies as well, as they have stepped into a non-repeating cycle where no National League pennant winner has returned to the World Series since the '96 Atlanta Braves.Almost every team in that time, save the Florida Marlins, who followed glory with yard sales, has worked to do it again, spending and patching and improving, whereas the challenge for the Rockies has been to hold things together for now and for later.Pitching has been more or less firmed with the securing of Aaron Cook and Jeff Francis, with the expected further development of Ubaldo Jimenez and Franklin Morales and the stunning emergence of Manny Corpas as a first-class closer.Even with the same kind of solid pitching, the Rockies will be as they were until that final flourish exaggerated and obscured the fact that they were no better than a half-dozen other NL teams, merely the most fortunate.There is no way to plan for luck. But at least the Rockies will know it when they see it.Wait 'til last year.(Contact Bernie Lincicome at lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com.)(Bernie Lincicome writes for the Rocky Mountain News at www.rockymountainnews.com.)