12 JUNE 26-JULY 2, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Colorado was “the third fastest team to reach fi fty losses in MLB history, making it the worst team in the last 125 years. In response, the team announced that at future games, they’re changing ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ to “Take Me Out Behind the Shed and Kill Me.’” A less comic blast against the Rockies sounded on the June 5 episode of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, when cohost Mi- chael Wilbon said that teams as extraordi- narily lousy as the Rockies and Marlins were “bad for baseball.” Goodman, who was watching, says he likes and respects Wilbon, but calls that “a throwaway kind of statement. In any sport, you can look at the bottom teams and say, ‘Is it good for the sport?’ But somebody’s got to lose, and you just have to hope it’s not your team.” Diehard Rockies loyalists didn’t have many reasons for optimism this spring. But the threepeat against the Marlins offered an opportunity to prove they could compete against a good opponent — and the Mets qualifi ed. They came into Coors Field lead- ing the National League East and boasted some of the biggest stars in professional baseball, including Juan Soto, Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor. Plus, that night’s Mets pitcher, Kodai Senga ,came to Colorado with the lowest earned run average in the National League — a stark contrast with right-hander Antonio Senzatela, scheduled to toss for the Rockies, who’d allowed 98 hits, the most of any NL hurler. While these stats made a loss seem not only likely but inevitable, Goodman gave the Rockies a chance, just as he does every game — and this tendency toward bullish- ness doesn’t endear him to cynics in the audience. Rockies boosters fed up with los- ing want its ownership group, led by Dick Monfort, to sell the team to someone willing to spend what’s necessary to return the team to respectability — and even if they know Goodman’s paychecks come from Major League Baseball, they’re frustrated that he won’t join the anti-Monfort chorus. Goodman doesn’t consider himself an apologist, but he can’t help pushing back against what he sees as false narratives — like that the franchise is cheap. “The Rockies’ payroll has always been commensurate with its market size,” he says. “I think they had the eleventh highest payroll a few years ago, and they’ve defi nitely handed out some big contracts. They just haven’t always paid off.” And then there’s the team’s location. “The Rockies have the most diffi cult path to sustained success in baseball because of the altitude factor,” he explains. “It’s not only that pitchers don’t want to come here because the ball doesn’t move as dramati- cally. It’s that athletes have to deal with going from altitude to sea level and back again. That isn’t Rocky Mountain bias. It’s a fact.” Still, Goodman isn’t blind to the Rockies’ shortcomings. “The Rockies have some re- ally good players,” he notes, citing the likes of Hunter Goodman and Ezequiel Tovar. “They just need more of them.” “You want to be honest so that you have credibility. But I’m not going to go on the air and bash individuals, whether they be players or management. That’s not my job.” Goodman began collecting facts early before the June 6 game. As usual, he rose before 8 a.m. and hopped aboard a stationary bike, pedaling for an hour as he perused stories about the Rockies, Mets and sports in gen- eral. Then, after “pushing some weights around,” he sat down to breakfast, reading more articles on a personal computer as he ate and jotting down salient details in an old- fashioned, spiral-bound baseball scorebook. He covered practically every inch of a page in tiny but neat handwriting using several different colors of ink. Not that Goodman is a Luddite. During broadcasts, he uses a laptop, an iPad and his phone, sometimes simultaneously. But he still scores the game by hand, just as baseball lovers did a century ago. “From a technical standpoint, I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be in 2025,” he says. “But with my notes, I still like to write them.” TV partner Ryan Spilborghs uses more modern tools, “but every time I’ve thought about transitioning, I’ve chickened out, because of how I learned to do it.” New York was Goodman’s original home. “I grew up in northern Westchester with my older sister, but my father was from the Bronx and my mom was from Brooklyn,” he recounts. “My dad grew up three blocks from Yankee Stadium, but he hated the Yankees. He’d walk across the Harlem River to the Polo Grounds. He worked there as a teenager and went to virtually every home game in 1951. He was at the game where Bobby Thomson hit the shot heard ‘round the world.” The event that shook young Goodman most profoundly was his mother’s death in an automobile accident. At fourteen, he was a passenger in the crash that killed her. He describes the incident as “godawful — the worst day of my life. It’s been 48 years, but I still think about my mom every day.” To deal with the tragedy, Goodman dove even deeper into sports, a shared obsession with his dad. (He has the same connec- tion with his own sons, Jacob, Zach and Gabe, with whom he is closer than close.) At a height that barely exceeded fi ve-six, he wasn’t an imposing fi gure, but that didn’t prevent him from participating in both foot- ball — “I was a smaller strong safety”— and baseball, for which he mainly played catcher. He was good enough to earn a slot in his high school’s hall of fame and subsequently made the baseball roster at well-regarded Ithaca College. But after a year and a half there, his coach told him “he had other plans that didn’t include me,” Goodman recalls. A part of Goodman wishes he’d trans- ferred to another college to prolong his play- ing career. But he doesn’t regret pivoting to broadcasting, another deep-seated passion; he’d even recorded simulated play-by-play sessions as a kid. On a ski trip to Aspen during his senior year at Ithaca, he made a contact at a local TV station, KSPN, and was hired in 1985. He worked in Aspen for over a year before moving to Denver and contributing to KSPN owner Joyce Hatton’s attempt to launch a TBS-style superstation in conjunc- tion with United Cable. In 1988, this project morphed into Prime Sports Network, where Goodman became a jack-of-all-trades. He emceed a wide array of college football and basketball games and even some NFL contests in the early 1990s. Then, in 1994, he became the Denver Nug- gets’ lead announcer, beginning a ten-year run in which the team’s success bookended its failure. “The Nuggets went to the playoffs my fi rst year and my last year,” he says. “But the eight years in-between, they didn’t go, and in 1997, they were so historically bad that it looked like they were going to set the mod- ern record for fewest wins. [The Nuggets ended up with eleven victories, narrowly surpassing the nine executed by the 1972 Philadelphia 76ers.] And now I’m involved with a team that has struggled at a historic level in a different sport.” In his words, “I have a Ph.D. in handling losing seasons.” Prime Sports eventually became Fox Sports, and in 1997 — four years after the Rockies played their fi rst game and two years after Coors Field opened — Colorado’s Major League team joined the lineup. Five years later, the play-by-play position opened up and Goodman got the rare opportunity to fi ll the role while acting in the same capacity for the Nuggets. He did double-duty for two years before Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke launched his own channel, Altitude, in 2004. That forced Goodman to choose between the Nuggets and the Rockies — and given his lifelong love affair with baseball, “the decision was simple,” he says. Most of the twenty years since then haven’t been easy for the Rockies. The team experienced a magical run to the 2007 World Series before falling to the Boston Red Sox and had a smattering of shorter playoff runs. However, the Rockies’ last winning season was 2018, and the die is already cast for 2025. Emblematic of Talk it Up continued from page 11 continued on page 14 Drew Goodman showing off his handwritten baseball scorecard in the rockies dugout. MICHAEL ROBERTS Drew Goodman and broadcast partner Cory Sullivan in the broadcast booth right before the start of the June 6 game. MICHAEL ROBERTS
