They may not win a lot, but no one can say the Colorado Rockies have been dull. Playing a distinctive "mile high style" of baseball in a pinball machine of a ballpark, they (and their opponents) have been lighting up scoreboards — and pitchers — for more than a decade.

Those who spent years (and in some cases decades) trying to lure a Major League franchise to Denver argued that their city was hungry for Major League Baseball. Their vision became realty when Denver was awarded a franchise in 1991, and their arguments vindicated two years later when the Rockies played their first game in front of over 80,000 fans, the largest opening day crowd in baseball history.

The Rockies won that game over Montreal 11-4, the franchise's first Major League win. They had lost their first two games to the Mets at Shea Stadium, 3-0 on April 5 and 6-1 on April 7, 1993.

In their first two seasons, the Rockies played to over 7.7 million fans at Mile High Stadium. They had fifty-two crowds exceed sixty-thousand and twenty-one times they exceeded seventy-thousand. This was not lost on Rockies ownership which had broken ground on Coors Field in 1991. Originally designed to accommodate forty-three thousand, they quickly redesigned the park to accommodate over fifty thousand before its 1995 opening.

The Rockies won the first game at Coors on April 26, 1995, defeating the Mets 11-9 in an example of "mile high style" of baseball (mile high is not an exaggeration at Coors Field — the 20th row of the upper deck is exactly one mile above sea level).

The "mile high style" of baseball comes courtesy of the thin air at Denver's altitude. According to the Coors Field web site, scientific studies show a baseball hit four-hundred feet in New York (sea level) will travel ten percent farther in Denver, or four-hundred forty feet. The result? A "mile high style" baseball where runs and home runs come cheaply, punch-and-judy hitters become sluggers, no lead is safe, and final scores sound like the teams had field goal kickers instead of batters in their lineups.

The 'mile high style" broke new ground in 1999 when a record three-hundred three homes runs were launched at Coors Field that year and the average score was 8-7.

Colorado Rockies History