When the Milwaukee Brewers left Coors Field last weekend having pocketed a three-game sweep of the Colorado Rockies, it marked just the third time in Milwaukee’s 29 National League seasons that such a road sweep had occurred. The Brewers are now 19 games under .500 all-time against the Rockies in Denver – but you can add another two losses to that ledger when you count the pair of games they lost to the Denver Zephyrs, their Triple-A minor league affiliate, back in 1987 and 1989.
It goes without saying that professional baseball was much different back in the late 1980’s than it is today, on the field and off. Back in those days, it wasn’t uncommon for fans of a local Triple-A team – like the Z’s – to get treated to a one-game visit from the big league club. In 1987, the first year that Denver was the Brewers’ top affiliate (the Z’s had been working with the Cincinnati Reds and the Brewers’ minor league affiliate was in Vancouver the year before) the game ended with the Z’s hitting a walk off home run.
It was an eventful year for both the Brewers and the Zephyrs.
The major-league club began the season with 13 straight wins. They were the toast of all of baseball. The streak ended in Chicago, where future Hollywood movie producer Mark Ciardi – he would go on to produce hit movies like The Rookie, The Game Plan, Miracle, and Million Dollar Arm, just to name a few – would get saddled with his only major-league loss. Nonetheless, the Brew Crew started the season 20-3. Juan Nieves threw the only no-hitter in team history. Later that season, future Hall-of-Famer Paul Molitor fashioned a 39-game hitting streak, still tied for the fifth longest of all-time.
Obviously, those good times couldn’t last.
In May of that year, in the midst of what would become a 12-game losing streak, they stopped off in Denver on their way from Oakland to Kansas City. “Team Streak,” as they’d come to be known, was eight games into what would become that 12-game skid. It would’ve been 13 if the loss at Mile High Stadium counted.
About three weeks later, top Milwaukee prospect and Z’s slugger Joey Meyer would hit the longest home run ever measured in the history of baseball, a 582-foot monster shot into the upper deck at Mile High Stadium. Back then, they didn’t measure things like home run distance and exit velocity on every ball hit. But Zephyrs General Manager Robert Howsam Jr. – the son of legendary MLB executive Bob Howsam – came up with the idea to have a surveyor go into the upper deck – a place normally reserved for Denver Broncos fans – and officially measure the distance from the seat to home plate. They could pinpoint the location because the game had been telecast on Denver’s Channel 2.
It came back at 582 feet. Nothing that’s been measured since has ever topped it.
Meyer was one of four Z’s sluggers – Steve Stanicek, Brad Komminsk and Steve Kiefer joined him – with more than 30 homers at the All-Star break. Yes, Denver went on to win the American Association title.
Meanwhile, the Brewers would end up going 91-71 but missed the playoffs after watching the Detroit Tigers win the American League Eastern Division. If there had been the same playoff format then that there is today, Milwaukee would have been the American League’s second wild card (they also finished behind Toronto in the final standings.) The American League and eventual World Series champs, the Minnesota Twins, won 87 regular season games and the AL West crown before beating the Tigers in the playoffs.
Six years later, Denver would be awarded an expansion franchise, and in 1998, when the Arizona Diamondbacks joined the NL, the Brewers swapped leagues and began annual trips to Denver.
Games between Triple A-affiliates and big league teams now only happen at the end of spring training. Travel and off days have become collective bargaining chips, so don’t expect that to change. But imagine the thrill in Albuquerque if the Rockies were to stop off to play the Isotopes on their way west some season? Then again, that might not be such a great idea from the Rockies’ side…
Strike 2: The Rockies weren’t the first team to host the Brewers in Denver Mile High Sports.
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