In the Shadow of the Rockies by Alan Gottlieb Roberts Rinehart Publishers For the five years before 1993, Alan Gottlieb had been covering such serious subjects as the homeless and migrant workers for the Denver Post. But he'd always had a secret wish to cover a baseball team. The coming of the Colorado Rockies to Denver that year was the perfect opportunity for him.

But Gottlieb didn't spend the year covering the team on the field. Instead, he had a unique assignment. Gottlieb spent the 1993 baseball season covering the inner workings of the Colorado Rockies, the people behind the team, from the organist to the scoreboard operator to the fans who spent their days and nights in the $1 "Rockpile" seats. The result of Gottlieb's year on the Rockies off-beat is In the Shadow of the Rockies, a very entertaining read.

One of the more interesting sections of the book is when Gottlieb interviews the scorekeepers at Rockies home games. Frank Haraway was the official scorekeeper for the Rockies. A longtime sports reporter for the Denver Post, Haraway was 76 years old in 1993 and had spent the past 52 years of his life scoring games for assorted Denver minor league teams. "The leagues used to want sportswriters to be official scorers, because they could always depend on them to be there for every game, and they were experienced at watching and analyzing games," Haraway tells Gottlieb. "Whether they were all sober is another question. They weren't, I know that."

But Haraway wasn't the only scorekeeper at the stadium. STATS, Inc., the Illinois-based statistics service, also paid three people $20 each to score the game--one in the pressbox and two others either sitting in the stands or watching on TV at home. Because STATS goal is to provide the most detailed and comprehensive statistics available, their scorekeepers were expected to do much more than Haraway, though his scoresheet was the one that would officially go on record with Major League Baseball.

Scorers for STATS kept track of each pitch simultaneoulsy on computers and on paper scorecards. Not only did they note each pitch, they marked down where every ball was hit, using a 26-section grid defined by the letters of the alphabet...Imagine sitting glued to your seat for three hours, so committed to witnesssing every pitch that you can't get up to go to the bathroom. "Well, I've never heard them say we can't go to the bathroom," (STATS, Inc., employee) Mark Hughes said. "But we're supposed to get every pitch, so if we go, we have to make it quick."

Gottlieb also spent time on the road, trying to discover the inner workings of some of the Rockies competitors. In Wrigley Field, he was allowed to sit inside the famed mechanical scoreboard for one game.

To enter the scoreboard's innards, which looked like something out of the movie Bladerunner, three members of the Wrigley Field grounds crew climbed a steel ladder from the bleachers about 20 minutes before game time. The first one up carried keys to the sheet-metal trap clenched in his teeth...Down on the first level, Darryl Wilson was responsible for sliding sheet-metal plates bearing each team's hit totals into the appropriate square windows. The paters were three feet square, sharp-edged and heavy. "I've never come close to dropping one, and let's hope I never do, because it would seriously fuck somebody up down there in the bleachers," he said..."Does it get hot?" Wilson asked rhetorically..."Oh, man. It gets so hot sometimes you can barely touch anything in tere. But I love this job. Look at the view." From his little window in the scoreboard, Wilson had a perfect view of the entire field. But as he spoke, he was looking straight down at fans in the bleachers, many of whom were scantily clad. "The women in the bleachers are awesome, dude, awesome!" he said. "And we can look right down their blouses from up here."

It's anecdotes like the above that make In the Shadow of the Rockies such an enjoyable read. It gives us average fans a chance to find out about the attainable jobs that just might be available to us by a major league team. In this age of bulked-up he-men players like Mark McGwire, it's near-impossible for the average man to imagine actually competing on a major league baseball field as a player. But he could just maybe work as a scorekeeper or an usher or a road secretary, if only he got the right breaks.

Gottlieb is an entertaining writer with a good eye for unusual stories that haven't been told before in the thousands of baseball books that have been published. I give In the Shadow of the Rockies a thumbs-up.

--JingleBob, May 8, 1999

In the Shadow of the Rockies may be available for purchase on the web at one of these sites.

© 1999 JC White