DENVER _ Raising your kids as Raiders fans is just bad parenting.
But the rest of those moving to Colorado wearing jerseys from faraway lands? I get it, and on the annual occasion of the Chicago Cubs' faithful turning Coors Field into Wrigley West, it's time the good people of Colorado embraced the uncomfortable truth: The enemy fanbases are here to stay.
The home-field advantage enjoyed here for so long is going, going, gone (at least at its previous level). And it's not coming back to what it once was.
"It's a city that, over the years, has grown," Rockies outfielder and nine-year resident Carlos Gonzalez told me before Game 1 of the Rockies-Cubs series on Monday night was postponed due to stormy weather, creating a split doubleheader starting at 12:10 p.m. Tuesday. "A lot of people come here from out of town, and they already like their team."
And the growth isn't stopping any time on the horizon. From a bench seat on my Light Rail ride to the ballpark on Monday, I saw more cranes (18) than stops (10) stretching across the city's skyline on the handy commute. Condos are going up. Business buildings are going up. Something that looks like the world's biggest grow house is going up. With it, the Cubs, Red Wings, Chiefs, Giants (both kinds), Bruins, Patriots, Spurs, Brewers, Wild, Cavaliers, Cowboys (just wait until Week 2) and Warriors fans are showing up.
This space isn't big enough to share all my ideas to ease the population boom _ two years of mandatory Light Rail use, for example _ but hopefully acceptance will help. The nights of Lakers fans overwhelming Nuggets games, Blackhawks fans treating Pepsi Center as a Cook County reunion, (name a Midwestern baseball team) invading Coors Field? They are here to stay.
This doesn't mean there isn't a home-field advantage. Of course there is, and the split crowds can turn run-of-the-mill midseason games into block parties. When the Nuggets upset the Warriors in February, Pepsi Center rocked like it hasn't in four years. But those are increasingly rare times. The home-field advantage here just isn't, and never will be, as pronounced as it once was.
Instead of taking the invasion as an affront to Colorado's sports fandom, try the opposite. Take it as a compliment. Tell them their team stinks, then thank them for our property values. The 50-50 crowds at Coors are a nod to Colorado's unrivaled greatness, not an indictment of a state's wilting fandom. Only 13 cities are cool enough to support the Big Four, and Denver does it as well as any of them.
The Broncos aren't immune, either. Since I began covering the team in 2012, the two games that stood out _ in terms of the most visiting fans, at least by the wholly unscientific eye test _ were the Packers (on Pat Bowlen night) and the Vikings (on a blissfully sunny Sunday). The Broncos won both, keeping the enemy crowd at bay, but the green and purple painted in spots across Mile High offered a startling reminder: they're not flying in from Green Bay and Minneapolis; they're driving in from Parker and Highlands Ranch.
Yes, Coloradans are a territorial bunch. But if you remove emotion from the equation _ a tall order these days _ can you blame them for moving here?
"A lot of people out West, their heritage is from the East. It just seemed like the natural occurrence, when the storied franchises came in to (play) the West Coast teams, they always had a good following," Rockies manager Bud Black said. "Am I used to that? Yes. Does it bother me? No. I like the fact that people have their team. I really like the fact (that) if it is a long-standing family tradition, I'm in on that. I think it's great."
Black has this moving thing down: His past two jobs were in San Diego and Denver. The man knows how to pick 'em.
"Now, the bandwagon fan? I'm off. I don't like if somebody all the sudden is a Cub fan," he said.
Cubs fans were lined up, along the third-base railing and next to the visitors dugout at Coors, at 5:42 p.m. on Monday. First pitch wasn't scheduled until 6:40, and the skies were still unloading buckets of rain onto their blue ball caps and Arrieta jerseys. Still, they stood, waited and got soaked.
Cubs fans are good at waiting. They once waited 108 years.
"They were world champions last year," the Rockies' Ian Desmond said Monday. "This year they're just the Cubs."
They're also good at moving to Colorado, and, according to numbers provided by the helpful people at the U.S. Census Bureau, do it often. From 2010-14, only one out-of-state county brought more people to Denver than Illinois' Cook County (991). Tops on the list was Los Angeles County (1,251), explaining the cost of living in southern California (how can it be so expensive, yet so broke?) as well as the "Let's go, Dodgers!" chants that echoed through Coors Field back in April.
It bothers the players, but they, too, are getting used to it. After the Rockies beat the Cubs last year with a late rally, Gonzalez, the Colorado veteran of the clubhouse, took the opportunity to put one visiting fan in his place.
"I had a guy right behind the dugout screaming at me all night because the Cubs were winning," CarGo said. "I ended up walking it off, so I was just trying to remind him to drive home safely, the game's over."
Hey, the invasion of Colorado's sports venues is nothing new. It's been going on for a while now, and it's not going away. Aside from Broncos games, playoff runs and visits from the Clippers, the home-field and home-court advantage here, like I-70 traffic to Summit County, will never be the same. They didn't move here to leave.
