In the Shadow of the Rockies: An Outsider's Look Inside a New Major League Baseball Team Book

When Denver Post non-sports writer Alan Gottlieb set out to cover the inaugural season of Denver's first major league baseball franchise, his instructions were simple: don't write a typical sports story. Beginning with a remarkable opening day in which 80,227 fans watched the first Rockie-at-bat, Eric Young, hit a home run, Gottlieb takes us through this remarkable inaugural season. He pokes around behind the scenes - in the byways sports writers never explore and those who are close to the game take for granted - in search of the odd, the off-beat, and the hidden. This cheerfully sardonic book examines everything from the fans in the $1 Rockpile seats to life on the road - "the millionaire gypsy caravan" where players, sports writers (and yes, the author himself) are all caught telling tales out of school. Fun and at times even pithy, In the Shadow of the Rockies humanizes the heroes, peels back the veneer of a seemingly faultless organization, and takes the reader on a rollicking tour of major league baseball in the 1990s.

The story of the Rockies, Colorado's first major league baseball team. Award-winning journalist Alan Gottlieb directs the broad and somewhat fractured vision of his "Behind the Seams" column in the Denver Post to the Colorado Rockies' phenomenal, record-shattering inaugural season in 1993. 20 photos.