DENVER, Colo. — The Colorado Rockies beat the Atlanta Braves on Sunday in stellar fashion, mounting a 10-1 lead after the teams were tied in the seventh inning.
It was the team’s most impressive win on the season, even if it was just one of the Rockies’ 14 successes they’ve amassed in their 71 games so far this season.
It’s been a historically bad season for the team on the field, but not when it comes to off the field.
The Rockies are drawing an average of 28,356 fans per home game this season, according to ESPN MLB league data.
Even though the Rockies are by far the worst team in baseball this year, their franchise ranks 16th among all 30 MLB teams.
On the field, the Rockies have a worse record than the Oakland Athletics did last season — another historically awful year. However, they’re still managing more than double the attendance of the Athletics’ 11,000 fans.
"[Colorado sports] is a massive driver,” DJ Summers of the Common Sense Institute said. “Sports, tourism and recreation are what really put the place together here in Colorado, in a very big way. And the Rockies exist as a subset of that larger constellation of industries."
The Common Sense Institute did a study that looked at the impact of Colorado sports teams on the state economy. It found that sports and tourism accounted for more than $60 billion, or 13.7% of Colorado’s GDP. The sports sector also accounted for one in six jobs in Colorado and is growing faster than our state’s overall economy.
When it comes to why the Rockies, specifically, still found economic success amid a season that has seen so little of it, Summers had this to say:
“One of the things that Rockies do well is compete with other area teams on pricing. Like, if you just look at what it costs to attend a Rockies game, it is 1/3 the price of attending a Broncos game. It's half the price of attending a nuggets game or an avalanche game. So, if you're just talking about sheer marketability, Rockies have it on the cheap side."
Summers adds the Colorado weather, Coors Field, and transplant nature of the Denver metro area are all draws for the team as well. So while fans might hate the product on the field, it’s hard to hate the profit off it.
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Severe storms begin to pick up Tuesday heading into the evening hours
Skies will begin to turn stormy and unsettled as early as the lunch hour. That's when we expect the first round of storms to develop along the Front Range. For the Pikes Peak Region and I-25 corridor, our main window for severe weather will come between 1-6 pm.
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