Behind the Scenes at Coors Field

As part of the new model year rollout from Toyota, I was invited to an event they held at Coors Field in Denver, Colorado. The event was focused on the 2015 model line Camry, Yaris and Sienna, but I’ll write about those in another article. When we were done with the presentation and test drives, we got a very nice tour of everything behind the scenes at Coors Field and that’s what I want to focus on in this post.

In the spirit of disclosure, I have to admit I maybe get to 1-2 Colorado Rockies games a year at the ballpark because, well, because I find baseball rather boring. If it were six innings and could end with a tie, if the average score was in the two digits, not one, then maybe it’d be more interesting. But when I hear a die-hard baseball fan talk excitedly about a no-hitter, well, ugh. Not for me.

And yes, as a soccer fan, I have heard people complain that soccer is boring as watching paint dry and when games can end 0:0 there’s something wrong with the game, but that’s another story, of course.

In any case, here are some of the photos I took from behind the scenes at Coors Field, along with my commentary:

You’ve seen this sign a million times on TV: It’s what’s directly behind home plate and the gate’s almost always closed during telecasts.

I’m standing just by home plate when I took this shot.

We couldn’t actually walk on the grass — which they mow up to three times/day — but this is almost as good: the view a batter has when they walk up to home plate for their turn at bat.

Notice there are almost no fans in your line of sight, it’s all about the field and that vine-covered wall that’d be the mark of a home run.

And before you go up to try for that home run, you’d be sitting here:

Sitting in the dugout, waiting for your turn at bat. The crowd noise must be deafening!

And speaking of the dugout, here’s what’s immediately above and behind it:

Coors Field is replacing all its plastic seats between seasons this year, for the very first time in the history of the ballpark. Except those two. Those are the Coors “Silver Bullet” seats and they don’t need replacing.

On the other side of the stadium are three red seats too: Those are the Coca-Cola seats and they’re right in the front row.

You’d think that as part of naming rights for the stadium Coors would have picked up better seats too.

But still, next year fans are going to be happy that the 50,000 seats in the stadium (minus these two) have been upgraded.

This is the entrance to the Colorado Rockies locker room. Notice the time clock on the wall. It’s supposedly to remind the players that they’re “on the clock” when they go in, that it’s a job and that they have to deliver.

Because players use the locker room year round, it’s off-limits to even the VIP tours, so we were not allowed to go in or even peek from the doorway. We did, however, get to walk through the visiting team’s locker room:

Quite nice, actually, and a quick glimpse in the trashcan showed that there were consumed bottles of Coors beer. Imagine. Apparently the teams have prep people who will go to a locker room like this on a road game and hang up each player’s clothes, uniform, etc. And they put temp name plates on each locker too. A nice space, way nicer than the locker room at the gyms I hang out!

And the best part of the locker room…

Yes, all those ballplayers apparently like their beauty and skin treatment options. The only thing that was a bit gross about this was the idea that they’re all sharing a single hairbrush. And it was dirty too. Ewww.

For professional athletes, locker rooms aren’t all just about changing uniforms and looking good, though. They also had a therapy room:

Apparently the Colorado Rockies have a team chiropractor and if someone on the other team gets injured, he’ll come into their locker room and work on them here in the therapy room too. Can’t help notice the similarity between those metal hydrotherapy spots and commercial baking gear. Maybe they secretly make cupcakes when no-one’s watching?

Finally, at the end of the tour we got a chance to take some pics of ourselves on the field, and here I am:

A great tour and it really reinforced what a beautiful, well appointed stadium we Coloradans have with Coors Field. Now we just need a baseball team to knock it out of the park next season!

Thanks to Toyota for sponsoring the ballpark tour!