Dick Monfort Is Not God or My Dad or My Boss
The Rockies stink but you don't have to be mad about it
In the year 1900, Charles Boettcher, a man who made his first fortune selling hardware to miners, realized that the western state of Colorado may be a perfect spot to start a sugar beet factory. Sugar beets had been an instrumental part of the European agricultural trade for a significant amount of time since the discovery that they could grow in colder climates than sugar cane and Boettcher saw an opportunity to diversify the Colorado economy by growing more crops alongside the lucrative ranching business. With that, Boettcher partnered with his friend and mining capitalist John Francis Campion to found the Great Western Sugar Company and opened their first factory in Loveland, Colorado. Within a few years, the company had leveraged the irrigation of northern Colorado and the new railroad system to grow their sugar beet company across the plains, with factories in Fort Morgan, Greeley, Brush, and stretching into Wyoming and Nebraska. By 1905, the Great Western Sugar Company was operating as one of the largest providers of sugar to the area and made sugar beet refining a new lucrative industry in a changing post-gold rush Colorado.
As the company grew and profits needed more growth potential, Boettcher leveraged migrant labor from Mexico and Central America as a cheap way to maintain a hard job at a low cost. By 1924, nearly 10,000 migrant laborers had moved into the Colorado beetroot industry, helping prop up its profitability throughout the decade.
Many of the best workers the farmers preferred would often leave and either not return or find new work in the months without a field harvest. To combat this, Great Western created “company towns." They leased migrants land for up to five years and allowed them to build an adobe home while they lived there. This led to dozens of families living in Colorado year-round and establishing a community of Mexican and Central American immigrants that continues to exist in Weld County today. In 1924, the Spanish Colony of Greeley was established, with about four dozen families living in adobe homes just north of downtown Greeley. These workers built themselves 40 homes in about four months and established a thriving community within their own boundaries.
The Spanish Colony (Española Subdivision, officially) had around 60 homes at its peak from the late 1920s into World War II. They raised chickens and pigs; they had large family potlucks on holidays; and, perhaps most importantly, they built a baseball field.
In 1925, one of the laborers, Dimas Salazar, noticed several Sugar Beet workers playing baseball and decided to start a team. He named it, perhaps uncleverly but descriptively, “The Spanish Colony of Greeley." In 1938, former bat boy Alvin Garcia picked up the team as manager and changed the name to the Greeley Grays. An inspiration from the Negro League’s Homestead Grays, a rising force in the Negro League with players like Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson. For 30 years, the Grays played elite baseball against either other colonies, local semi-pro clubs, or even collegiate teams. The players would often sew their own gloves out of discarded clothing, they’d make practice balls out of socks and rubber cores. A six-day work week culminated in a Sunday with church and baseball. The two best places to find God.
Baseball in Colorado has a rich history outside the Grays. But the Grays, a team created from immigrant laborers, are a part of baseball that often gets lost in the heated debate of the modern game. Too often, and likely for good reason, the nature of the professional leagues dominate the conversation about the sport. The best players deserve the most attention, sure, but it’s become commonplace to substitute “baseball” when one means “MLB”.
But baseball, its history and its heart, lives in fields like the one built in the Spanish Colony. The Grays were (and still are, as they exist today as a summer collegiate team) a sense of community and pride for Latinos in Northern Colorado. Though they were not built due to an abhorrent racist policy, the Latino baseball teams of this era share a similarity to the Negro Leagues. They were built by a community for that community. Sugar beet workers, tired and stressed from exceptionally hard days of labor, played baseball to pass the time. Their families, tired and stressed from building a brand new life in a country they knew little about, watched them to share in that leisure and build a community. They cheered, they laughed, they cooked. They played baseball. The sport became the gathering place. Every Sunday, cars would line the field. Pots of food would be brought out. Horns would honk for home runs, and music would play throughout. Other colonies, often filled with family members of those in the Española Subdivision, would come to talk trash, cheer, and ultimately party. Baseball was the reason, but community was the celebration. It is easy to fall into the trap of worrying that professional baseball, and the results therein, are the lone driving force behind fandom. It is easy to only talk about professional baseball when the sport comes up. Hell, I’m about to do it right now. But, I don’t know if that’s the only reason I keep turning it on.
In 1993, nearly 70 years after the Grays began playing colonia baseball, the Colorado Rockies became the first Major League Baseball club in Colorado’s history.
The Rockies are set for another historically bad season in 2024. A team not admitting to anyone publicly that it is in a rebuild but most assuredly is in the midst of one. A harsh one, a difficult one built on the mistakes of the last five seasons. For the first time ever, the club lost 100 games and it is projected to do the same again this season. There are several arguments that the club is the worst team in the National League and all of them have merit. The Rockies are bad, they will likely not be fun to watch. I’ve heard many people say this has killed them even liking the sport. Which, I guess is fair to an extent. The Rockies are the best version of the sport in the sense that they are 26 professional players, and if the best version of the sport locally is…well, the Rockies, then it may be understandable to prefer to no longer watch. There is certainly no shame in removing yourself from a product that no longer appeals to you.
Baseball is obviously more than the Major Leagues, it is more than the Rockies, it is more than the results on the field. You don’t need this post or the Grays to tell you that. But perhaps a reminder, as the Rockies toil their way through another garbage season, they do not own the sport. That still belongs to us. The joy we take from the sport is hardly an approval of the actions of its professional owners who seem hellbent on extracting weird percentages of profit from us. Last year, I wrote about how my late grandmother’s love for the sport endured, how our shared passion for baseball was bigger than anything else. The Grays and the teams like them are just more proof that professional baseball is just one vehicle to place our passion.
There’s a moment when you grow old that you start to view the machines behind the things you love. The Wizard of Oz’s metaphor was the man behind the curtain, but in reality, it’s the churning reality of business that becomes visible the older you get. Baseball moves from green grass with your friends and superhero athletes to John Fisher moving the Oakland A’s against seemingly everyone’s wishes. All the things you love are operated by the machines. The movies, the music, sport. They all function to pass money from your hand to some suit with a quantitative intern. They tell you to never meet your heroes but maybe they should warn you to never learn about something you love. It can make one cynical, fuse distrust to your bones, and leave you as a person posting negative reactions to every movie trailer you see online. But I think if you aren’t the kind of person who can get excited about business numbers or see the value in an equity group investment fund, you have to do your best to make these things worthwhile. Not to say ignore anything truly horrible that capital does in its maintenance of the things you love, but to remind yourself that the things that drew you in are still there.
I wish the Rockies weren’t a constant reminder of all the garbage that this world has to offer. The owner is a failson of a massive meat packing company that sold itself off to a global conglomerate (to add insult, that conglomerate now spends most of its time in the news for labor violations), that same owner is now actively playing a part in the equity firm takeover and subsequent ruining of Denver (he, or his family, is currently trying to tear down El Chapultepec), the team itself is a product of incompetence and nepotism. If you scratch any corner of the Rockies Experience™ you will uncover a world of pain and ruin. I wish none of this was true. But, as we are reminded every multi-run loss, it is. Yet, here we are.
I don’t think I am alone when I say I found other things, too. Not just memories with family or the haunting pain of Joe Beimel coming out one batter too late, either. We wouldn’t keep coming back if there wasn’t something. I think that something is the promise of community. I think it’s the same thing they came to the ball fields in Española for. The 14 dollar beers aren’t so good that you can drink away the pain of another blown multi run lead in the 6th but maybe everything around it is.
If the laborers of the Great Western Sugar Beet Company can play with a sock sewn into a ball, if their families can find joy in each other, then ultimately the sport and its results are secondary to the things that truly make it. Perhaps there is a lesson there. Or perhaps I’m grasping at straws to try and justify the hours I’ll spend watching Tyler Kinley. I suppose the point remains, though. I’m watching him pitch for some reason or another.
(Some great sources on The Grays, The Española Subdivision or Spanish Colony, and Sugar Beet history of Northern Colorado:
https://www.amazon.com/Sugar-Diamonds-Baseball-1925-1969-Challenge/dp/143895252X
http://greeleyhistory.org/pages/spanish_colony.html
https://www.greeleytribune.com/2002/11/25/spanish-colony-built-by-hispanic-settlers/
https://www.greeleyhistory.org/pages/greeley_grays.html
https://www.9news.com/article/news/the-history-of-the-greeley-grays/73-612699991)