The Impossible Feat (One Sixty-Two: Day Seven)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Seven: Ubaldo Jimenez, Colorado Rockies

While teaching a college reading-skills course one summer, I assigned my students David Ferrell’s Los Angeles Times feature story on the ultra-marathon known as “Badwater.” As we read and discussed the story, my students were amazed that there are human beings who run a 135-mile race from Death Valley to Mt. Whitney, Calif., often through temperatures well above 100 degrees. It doesn’t seem humanly possible, yet there are a select few who start and finish Badwater.

Achieving the near-impossible – it’s something that humans have been striving to do for as long as they’ve walked the earth. Climbing the tallest mountain, tightrope-walking between skyscrapers, swimming across channels – it’s part of what we do, part of our genetic makeup. And whenever we break another barrier, a name gets added to the list of trailblazers, stretching from Pheidippides the marathon runner to Phelps the swimmer.

It is time to add another name to that list. This young man has figured out something that no one has done before: He’s learned how to pitch dominant baseball in Denver, Colorado. For the past 17 years, Coors Field in downtown Denver has been known more as a launching pad than as the home to baseball’s Colorado Rockies. The thin, dry Rocky Mountain air helps baseballs soar farther at Coors than they would at lower elevations. Even though the Rockies have been storing their balls in an atmosphere-controlled room known as the “humidor” for eight years, the balls can still fly out of that park: Witness yesterday’s 12-11 Arizona win over Colorado in Denver.

But now, amid the long fly balls of 2010, a trailblazer has arrived. He is 26 years old, 6-foot-4, and born in the Dominican Republic. He has endured his share of tough games at Coors, but now things are different. As April comes to a close, the National League will surely name Ubaldo Jimenez its player of the month. He is 5-0 with a 0.79 earned-run average so far this year. Since May 1 of last year, Jimenez is 19-9, and not once have hitters hit better than .250 against him in a month. On April 17, Jimenez took things a step further and pitched a no-hitter – the first in Rockies’ history – against the Atlanta Braves.

Oh, and the kicker – he pitches no worse at home in Coors than he does away. Indeed, Ubaldo Jimenez has found a way to do what many thought to be impossible. This is a team that many pitchers have long avoided, for fear that the Denver air would wreck their careers, not to mention their statistics. This is a stadium known more for football-like scores than baseball ledgers. And yet, here he stands, 98-mile fastball in hand.

The Associated Press reported that on the day after his no-hitter, Jimenez awoke at 6:30 a.m. and ran six miles, slightly longer than his usual run on the day after he pitches.

Hey, it wasn’t Badwater. But for now, at least, one impossible feat is enough.