“It’s ill-advised”: A farewell to Colorado Rockies beat writer Patrick Saunders

The last question I asked Patrick Saunders wasn’t really a question. It was a setup, and he knew it.

“Patrick — what was that?”

“That was a lead-off walk,” he said.

“What is a lead-off walk?”

“It’s ill-advised.”

“And what could happen?”

“It could come back to haunt you.”

He told me so himself, grinning, in the same press box where he taught me — without ever standing at a chalkboard — how to do this job.

On Wednesday, he covered the Rockies for the last time as a member of the Denver Post. Saunders left the paper this week after 28 years, the last two decades of which sent chronicling a baseball team that has spent most of that time losing. He started on the Broncos beat in October 1998. He moved to the Rockies in 2005. He had, by any honest accounting, been the closest thing this franchise has to a collective memory.

I should be upfront about something: I can’t write about Patrick Saunders the way a stranger could. He was my professor at the University of Colorado before he was the man sitting in the row in front of me at Coors Field. Somewhere in there, he became my friend. So this isn’t a neutral send-off. It’s a thank-you, written by one of the people he taught — and an attempt to explain, to anyone who only knows him by his byline, what all of us just lost.

The reporter who didn’t want the beat

The strange thing about the best Rockies writer of his generation is that the beat started as a punishment.

“It was a demotion, and I felt it,” Saunders said of the 2005 move off the Broncos. “It was the first setback of my career.”

The Post was in flux. Adam Schefter, his old colleague, had left for NFL Network. And the Rockies were bad — “kind of like they are now,” he said, “not as bad, but they were bad in ‘05.”

What changed was the access. In football, he watched walls go up every year — the quarterback available twice a week, everyone else held at an arm’s length. Baseball was the opposite. The manager took questions nearly every day. The players were available, too, if you were willing to wait them out and do the work.

“It’s a more personal, more human sport,” he said. “I always loved baseball more than any other sport.”

By then, he’d already lived several careers. He’d been the sports editor at the Longmont Times-Call, back when small papers still swung above their weight. It was, by the account of the people who were there, a genuine golden age.

“It’s hard to explain how many resources the Times-Call had back then,” said Troy Renck, now a sports columnist at the Denver Post — the same paper Saunders is leaving — whom Saunders hired at the Times-Call in September 1996. Big Sunday sections, real travel budgets, late deadlines, multiple national awards.

“We were so creative there,” Renck said. “It felt like we were limited only by our imagination, and Patrick fostered that.”

What Patrick fostered, specifically, was nerve.

“His love of history, his love of storytelling — he pushed us in that direction,” Renck said. “Go off the beaten path. We’re not going to be breaking news, per se, so take chances.”

He was also, Renck learned, a deceptively firm editor. He had a famous note — be clever, not cute — for a young writer who’d fallen in love with his own analogies.

“Sometimes when you fall in love with analogies, three average ones aren’t as good as one really good one,” Renck said.

Patrick nearly talked himself out of the work twice. The second time was the editing detour — the Post asked him to run its online sports coverage around 2010, a role that came with a pay raise and a title.

“I found out within about three months that I hated it,” he said.

He stuck it out for two years and then lobbied to get back on the Rockies beat.

He says the desk made him better anyway.

“I learned that less is more,” he said. “Early on… I would pile too many adjectives, maybe too much hyperbole.”

Watching other people’s overwritten copy cured him of his own. We have a name for the affliction in our corner of the press box. He calls them purple phrases.

The two men’s lives kept folding back on each other.

Renck took over the Broncos beat when Saunders left it for the Post. Roughly a decade later, they landed on the Rockies beat together and covered a trip to the World Series side by side.

There was no one, Renck said, he’d have rather done it with. They’ve taken a ski trip; he’s been to Patrick and his wife, Nancy’s, house; he calls them “beautiful people.” Thirty years on, he still measures his career against the day a sports editor in Longmont took a chance on him.

“I will be eternally grateful that our paths crossed and that he gave me the first opportunity to cover pro sports,” Renck told me. “He changed the trajectory of my career. I’ll be forever grateful for his leadership, friendship, and what it’s meant to my family and our lives. We still live in Longmont. Every day I wake up, I’m connected to Patrick in some way.”

“He doesn’t just ask questions. He listens to the answers.”

If you’ve spent any time around Saunders in a scrum, you’ve watched him do the thing that’s hardest to teach: ask a difficult question in a way that opens a person up instead of shutting them down.

I asked him how long it took to learn. He said it mostly came naturally — he’s not, in his words, “a gotcha kind of guy.” There are people in this business, he said, who don’t actually want to know what’s going on: They want “an inflammatory response they can hang their sound bite on.” That was never him. But the empathy was learned, too, and at a cost.

Early in his Broncos days, after a brutal loss in which Corey Dillion ran for what was then an NFL-record 278 yards, a younger Saunders grabbed the microphone and asked head coach Mike Shanahan if he was embarrassed.

“It got a great response. He went off,” Saunders remembered. “But then that following Monday… I got called up to the principal’s office.” Shanahan, he said, “f-bombed me. ‘Why would you ask it in that way?’”

The lesson stuck: “To piss somebody off just to get a reaction is not worth it.”

That’s the empathy. The edge is still there when he needs it. He recalled pressing Rockies team president Greg Feasel hard when the club promoted Bill Schmidt to general manager after publicly saying it would look outside the organization.

There are moments, he said, when a reporter working on behalf of the fan base can feel he’s getting a snow job, when the room needs someone to push against the tide. He doesn’t do it often.

“But you’ve got to once in a while.”

The skill underneath all of it, he agreed, is reading a room — knowing the difference between a man who’s hurting and a man who’s spinning.

Thomas Harding of MLB.com, who has covered the Rockies for longer than almost anyone and who calls Saunders his “brother from another mother,” put the craft more simply.

“He doesn’t just ask questions,” Harding said. “He listens to the answers. Those are the things you emulate about Patrick Saunders.”

Renck pointed at a quieter skill: patience.

He credits Saunders’ reporting on the Walton family’s investment in the Rockies to roughly six months of unglamorous, dead-end source work.

“It’s not always about instant gratification,” Renck said. “He kept pecking away and pecking away.”

The lesson he’d hand a young reporter: “That big story will define your career more than 50 great social media posts. There is still room for patience on a beat.”

The stories that weren’t about box scores

Ask Saunders about the work he’s proudest of, and he doesn’t reach for a game.

“I did a series, many years ago, about the issues of mental illness in sports,” he said.

It won national awards, but that’s not why it mattered to him. He’d lived it — “I had suffered through some huge anxiety problems of my own” — and the response from readers undid him a little. Parents emailed to say they’d shown his stories to a struggling kid, a husband, a wife.

“‘If so-and-so has dealt with these issues, well, that doesn’t make me weird,’” he recalled them writing. “Of all the stuff I’ve done… I was very, very proud of that.”

The same instinct runs through his Todd Helton work — a Hall-of-Fame send-off that didn’t flinch from Helton’s struggles off the field.

“I gave the readers, I thought, a really good insight into a Hall of Fame player, the greatest player in Rockies history, and showed them the human side.”

This raises the obvious question: How do you keep finding stories on a team that lost 119 games?

“It’s been really hard,” he admitted. “What’s really hard is to not become so cynical that every story you write becomes a negative story.”

When the losing first cratered — the first of three consecutive 100-loss seasons in 2023 — the Post didn’t look away. They ran a four-part investigative series called “The Rockie Way,” a deep, critical dive into the state of the franchise.

“It was very critical of the Rockies,” he said, “but I thought it was worth doing.”

On a day-to-day basis, his answer is a line I’ve already stolen: “You root for the story.” Not the team. The story. A no-hitter, four homers in a game, a rookie figuring it out. He told me his late mother used to scold him for getting too negative about the Rockies. Sometimes he’d answer back — “Mom, the Rockies suck” — and sometimes he’d catch himself and decide she was right.

There’s a melancholy to covering a team that never matters in October, and he named it without flinching. He’d love, he said, to be able to ask manager Warren Schaeffer a question about his strategic decisions with a season on the line and get a bristly answer back.

“But with the way Rockies are, we don’t talk about that a whole lot because, truthfully, they’re never in the hunt.”

Twenty-one seasons on the beat. Playoff teams in 2007, 2009, 2017, and 2018. Never a division title.

“I just wish they’d been better,” he said, “for the good of the city, for the good of the team, and the good of my career.”

Here is what actually walks out the door with Patrick Saunders, and it’s bigger than one writer.

“If I could do my life over again, I’d be Ken Burns,” he said — a line Renck, in a separate conversation, used about him completely unprompted.

What he loves about the beat is the thing most people overlook: “You are a day-to-day historian of a day-to-day sport.”

And he is not sure the job will survive him.

There’s an ongoing debate inside the Post, he said, about whether the paper is still “the paper of record — whether, ten years from now, anyone will be able to open the archives and find the box scores and game stories from this team’s worst years. He’s old-school enough to believe someone should still be doing it. He’s also clear-eyed about why fewer papers are: the readership isn’t there, the travel budgets are gone, and the staffs are too small.

“Chronicling the day-to-day of a baseball team,” he said, “might be going by the wayside.”

His colleagues say the same thing from different angles, and together it sounds like an elegy for a kind of journalism.

Harding, who came up in the era when the Post and the Rocky Mountain News were “blood competitors,” makes the civic case: a beat covered every day, win or lose, is a healthier thing for a fan base than a press box that only shows up when the team is good.

“When you jump on the bandwagon, you’re behind,” he said. “When the team wins, it doesn’t just drop out of the sky. Something happening during the lean years leads to what happens then.” A long-suffering fan base is owed information while it suffers.

Renck framed the loss as institutional knowledge — the thing that lets a writer place a moment in context instead of treating it as superficial or brand new. The modern churn, he said, tends to drop a stranger onto a beat who’s “looking to make a name for themselves so they can go cover something else”

Patrick was the opposite.

“He was there for the long haul,” Renck said. “People like him, they anchor a beat.”

And then he said the truest thing anyone said to me about Patrick: “You lose someone who genuinely loves the game — and loves writing even more than baseball. That’s just not as common as people think in our industry.”

Here is the part the byline never showed you.

That bit from the top — the lead-off walk — is gloriously, deliberately silly, and the people running it know exactly what it is.

Harding calls it “a silliness… that everybody doesn’t get.” Kevin Henry will tell you the rest of the press box thinks they’re crazy.

It started when Bud Black said something about lead-off walks coming back to haunt a team, and Saunders and Harding turned it into a call-and-response liturgy. Patrick is the point guard.

“Magic Johnson, Russell Westbrook, whatever you want to say,” said Kevin Henry of the Denver Gazette.

Patrick sets it up: the rest of us deliver our lines.

“It’s ill-advised.” “It’ll come back to haunt you.”

Half the press box thinks we’re crazy. Patrick has never cared — by Henry’s telling, he runs it for their sake as much as anybody’s.

The bit is the surface of something he and Harding spent two decades building on purpose: a press box that feels like a family, which is not a given in a business that used to be war. When Harding first started the Post, the News, the Boulder Daily Camera, the Times-Call, and his own Colorado Springs Gazette were all clawing for the same morning scoop — competition that, he said, sometimes turned nasty, even physical.

In Saunders, he found a rival he could beat and be beaten by without it curdling.

“We compete,” Harding said, “but if somebody gets a story, we’ll actually call — ‘hey, man, good story,’”

Twitter eventually killed the scoop entirely; two minutes after you break something, ten people have it, and no one remembers who was first.

What didn’t die was the courtesy Patrick modeled. A reporter at the Gazette started calling him “the dad of the press box” after he reminded her to bring a coat to an early-season game. The name stuck because it was true.

The color is endless, and I only have room for some of it.

Harding teasing him about ordering wine while watching an NBA Finals game in Houston — “I wouldn’t know a glass of Malbec from Alex Trebek”

Patrick answering his phone in a boiling Tucson press box and addressing his wife as “Baby Cakes”, then never living it down.

The encyclopedia of music in his head — everything from the ‘60s through the ‘90s, title and artist and lyrics, ready to fill a dead inning.

The golden retrievers he adores.

“He has a very good split personality,” Henry said — breaking down a roster crunch one minute, doing his own version of a baseball song the next. “He’s an absolute blast to be around.”

For the younger writers, Patrick was the on-ramp.

Henry first showed up as a Rockies blogger — the “Rockies Examiner,” back in the examiner.com days — sure he didn’t belong.

“Patrick was one of the first people I met,” he said. “For him to even take the time to talk to me… made a world of difference for me as a young reporter.”

He also became the institutional memory Henry leaned on, the way Henry once leaned on a legendary Tulsa scribe who’d covered the Drillers for 40-plus years. Losing Patrick, Henry said, means losing perspective.

“If something happens in a game, it’s not going to be ‘oh, I remember when Manny Corpas did that.’ There’s not going to be any of that anymore — and that’s one of the saddest things for me.”

He’s young in his own Rockies history, he admits, which is why Patrick was the man he’d go to: “What was Helton like in his prime? What was Tulo like before the trade?” Henry said.

The best of it came on the road. After a 2018 tiebreaker loss at Dodger Stadium, it was Saunders, Harding, and Henry killing a layover at an In-N-Out, watching planes lift off, waiting on a red-eye to Chicago for a Wild Card game the next night.

“Just the three of us sitting there, just talking — baseball, life, how tired we were about to be,” Henry said. “One of my favorite memories on the road, ever.”

Even in the COVID season, masked and spaced in an empty Coors Field, Patrick and Harding found a way to make fun — “and that was a time when we needed a lot of fun,” Henry said.

Harding, for his part, doesn’t pretend he’s lost a coworker.

“I’ve spent more time with him than any other human being in my life,” he said — then added, laughing, that Patrick would say the same, and they’re both married.

(Midway through our conversation, Patrick wandered over and started massaging Harding’s shoulders. “Those are my dorsal fins,” Harding said, not missing a beat. They have terminology for everything. No one else understands it. That’s rather the point.)

When I asked Henry what he’d say to Patrick on the record, he didn’t reach for anything grand.

“Thank you for making a lot of bad Rockies teams still fun to cover,” he said. “And thank you for helping a young guy who wasn’t sure he fit in know that he fit in.

I am not the only one Saunders taught, and I won’t pretend to be his best student. There’s a small cohort of us — his debut CU class, spring 2025 — who’d argue over that title.

Harrison Simeon met Patrick the same way I did: as a guest lecturer in a separate class, before either of us knew he’d be grading us. A New Orleans kid who’d fallen for sports journalism through SportsCenter, Simeon took that first class and went on to run CU student sports media group, Sko Buffs Sports, as editor-in-chief and president. What he remembers about Saunders is how low the barrier was.

“He just wanted to find people who were interested in sports journalism,” Simeon said, “and when he noticed someone who had potential, he would nurture and help them like crazy. He’d get to class super early and help anybody who stopped by.”

He also got the treatment the serious ones got — which is to say, Patrick was harder on him than on the kids who were there for an elective. He nicknamed Simeon “Wordsmith,” loved his ideas, and then took a red pen to the part of his writing that needed it.

“It was wordy, it was colorful — or purple,” Simeon said.

The purple phrases. The same diagnosis Patrick once made of his own copy, handed down.

“He was harder on my writing than a lot of the other kids, but it was because he held me to a higher standard. He saw the potential I had.”

Simeon took it as fuel: “He made it so easy to be myself in my writing, but also find ways to improve.”

He called Patrick his first real mentor, asked him to write a reference for a job application, and still texts him for advice.

And Patrick never let the relationship end at the final grade — Simeon described stopping by the classroom long after his semester as Patrick’s student had concluded and being folded right back in, handed an Ezequiel Tovar bobblehead at a class outing to a Rockies game as if he’d never left.

Kenzie Cole was in that same first room, and she’s proof Patrick didn’t only care about the ones who’d go pro in journalism. She didn’t end up in journalism at all — she runs marketing for several programs at West Virginia Athletics now — and Saunders couldn’t have been happier for her.

“He was 10 toes behind me,” she said.

What set him apart from other professors was simple: he’d actually done it.

“He’s one of two or three instructors I’ve had my entire time in college who’s actually been boots on the ground. He spoke from day-to-day experience.”

She had a private litmus test for the field — you meet people in journalism who “still have the light in their eyes,” she said, “and then you meet everyone else.” Patrick had the light.

When she landed the West Virginia job, she emailed her old professor. He was, in her words, “incredibly stoked.”

Saunders is of two minds about teaching it, too. He’s proud of the students who caught the bug — he named a few, and I’ll admit it meant something to hear my own name in the list. And he’s rethinking how he teaches the course, pulling it away from pure beat writing toward the wider media world his students will actually inherit — media relations, podcasts, hybrids.

“If they want a job in this field… there’s so much else there now.”

Asked what she’d tell him on the record, Cole circled back to the thing that outlived the semester.

“Your passion and your love for the art of journalism in sport — that’s contagious,” she said. “It’s so much more than a semester-long class. It’s something I’ve carried with me every day. He answers emails off the clock. He just wants the best for each and every one of us.”

Simeon, given the same prompt, worried mostly that Patrick doesn’t grasp his own reach.

“He’ll be missed more than he could imagine,” he said. “He’s very humble. I don’t think he realizes the impact he’s had on so many young people. In just a few semesters of teaching — his first time ever teaching a class like that — he shaped my journey, and a lot of people’s.”

He kept going, the way you do about someone who matters.

“He’s the goat. Truly the greatest to ever do it. And he’s always going to be appreciated.”

I asked Patrick the same question I asked everyone — if there was anything he wanted to say, on the record, to the people in that press box and the readers who’d followed him for 28 years.

He started, of course, with Harding.

“Thomas is the most special person I’ve met on this beat,” he said, “My brother from another mother, for sure.”

He loves that the writers ended up so close, that they treated the work seriously and still had a good time doing it. But mostly, he said, it was the relationships — with the fans, and with Buddy Black and Jim Tracy and Todd Helton and Ryan McMahon and Kyle Freeland and Nolan Arenado.

To get to know those managers and players as people, to be able to kid with them, to know that if he runs into one of them ten years from now he’ll get a hug — “That’s pretty cool, right? I’m not behind some corporate desk, being an automaton crunching numbers. No offense to accountants out there, but thank God my career wasn’t that.”

And the next generation? He and Harding made a decision a long time ago, he said, never to be the old guys guarding the door.

“Our egos never got in the way and made us say, ‘What are you doing, you young punk?’ Thomas and I have always thought that we want the next generation to be better than we are. I think that’s important.”

I asked him what he’s most excited about, now that the daily grind is behind him.

“Travel,” he said. “Hiking with my puppies. And getting back in shape.”

That’s the whole answer. No grand thesis.

A man who spent 28 years putting spin on box scores, ready to go be a person for a while.

The beat will eventually get a new writer. It always does. But the new writer won’t have stood in the Broncos locker room the night John Elway finally won it all and watched him celebrate with his father — Patrick remembers it well, an afternoon-paper deadline so loose he and Renck stayed up all night and filed five bylines between them. The new writer won’t have the 2007 Rocktober tiebreaker filed under “favorite day” — the deadline chaos, Matt Holliday at the plate, Mark Kiszla banging out a contrarian column for the ages. Won’t remember, first-hand, what Coors Field felt like when it mattered.

What I keep coming back to is something Harding said when I asked what it’ll feel like with the seat next to him empty. He didn’t get sentimental. He just refused the premise.

“It’s not over,” he said. “We’re going to still be together.”

I think he’s right. The lead-off walk isn’t going anywhere — Patrick made sure of that, handing it down to the rest of us like it was worth keeping (it is). And maybe that’s the whole legacy, the thing that outlasts the byline: he taught a press box full of competitors how to be a family, and he taught a kid from his classroom how to do the job he just left.

It’s ill-advised, letting a guy like that walk out the door.

It’ll come back to haunt you.