In his debut at Coors Field for the new-look Rockies, starting pitcher Michael Lorenzen took the mound and got his socks knocked off like Charlie Brown.

Wah, wah, wah.

The juju was bad and the feeling of deja vu hurt worse during the home opener in LoDo, as the your local baseball zeros got blasted 10-1 Friday afternoon by a legit major league team from Philadelphia.

We’re forever April fools for these Rockies.

More than 48,000 die-hards wasted their hard-earned cash on a team that looked as hopelessly lost as the sad-sack squad that got beat 119 times a year ago.  

“You’ve got to look at it with a sense of urgency, but no panic,” Lorenzen said.

Urgency? Panic?

Really, Mr. Lorenzen?

You must be new around here, pardner.

We don’t make that kind of emotional investment in a pro sports franchise not even worthy of our contempt. We’ll save our worry beads for Nikola Jokic and Nathan MacKinnon in the playoffs.

For the past seven years, baseball lovers in Colorado have filled the South Platte with a river of purple tears. We’ve got no tears left to give. Around here, baseball season is an excuse for drinking beer and eating Dippin’ Dots until the Broncos start training camp.

For the Rockies, everything old is dumb again.

What the heck was Paul DePodesta thinking when he decided his first big move as the team’s new president of baseball operations was to give Lorenzen an $8 million salary that the player’s agent thought was a bad idea?

During a February interview with The Athletic, Lorenzen admitted that when he broached the topic of joining the Rockies as a free agent, his agent’s reaction was: “You’re completely insane … What are we doing?”

You’ve got to be dumb as a Rockie to volunteer to pitch at 5,280 feet above sea level on a regular basis. But give Lorenzen this: No matter how hard he gets hit, those paychecks won’t bounce.

And to be fair, during his three decades as a sports executive, DePodesta has committed bigger blunders.

As some of you might recall, DePodesta was one of the big brains in the Cleveland Browns front office who thought it was smart to trust the team’s future with quarterback Deshaun Watson.

Well, a year before DePodesta landed his first sports job as an intern with the Cleveland Indians, I braved the 42-degree cold to watch Bill Swift throw the first pitch on the spring evening when Coors Field was officially christened as the launch pad where a pitcher’s best stuff gets shot into orbit.

With a wicked sinker in his arsenal and a season of leading the National League in earned run average on his resume, Swift came to Colorado from San Francisco in 1995 as the first hurler in franchise history to sign a significant deal as a free agent. In expectation, Swift would be the staff ace;  his deal was for three years and a total of $12 million, which tells you how much the economics of the game have changed.

Colorado beat the New York Mets 11-9 on that April night 31 years ago, when the Blake Street Bombers were born to the thunderous roar in LoDo as Dante Bichette circled the bases with a walk-off homer in the bottom of the 14th inning.

And Swift? He recorded an 8.75 ERA during his first seven outings in Coors. Being a solid Christian, Swift never cursed his fate and fought gamely at altitude until his right arm fell off, requiring shoulder surgery.

Whatever hope the Rockies brought into 2026 was lost in the top of the first inning of the home opener, when Lorenzen didn’t have the trust in his stuff to throw a first-pitch strike, the Phillies scored seven times and the capacity crowd serenaded him with a sarcastic cheer upon finally recording an out.

Where does Lorenzen go from here? Were there lessons to be learned?

“One of them, I’ll kinda keep to myself, because I don’t want it out in the media,” Lorenzen said. “But I just think the attack could be a little better. A little different game plan here in Coors, obviously, than you’re going to do on the road.”

During the 152/3 innings Lorenzen has had the pleasure of pitching in Denver, his ERA is 12.64, with opposing hitters smacking him with a .356 batting average.

Wah, wah, wah.

Better pitchers and smarter men than Lorenzen have allowed themselves to believe they could wrestle this bear that lives a mile above sea level.

As Lorenzen walked off the mound after surrendering 12 hits, including two dingers that traveled more than 450 feet, and nine earned runs in three innings, he stepped on old shards from the shattered egos of Darryl Kile, Denny Neagle and Mike Hampton that have been pounded into the dirt on the mound in Coors Field.

Using the same crayons quarterback Russell Wilson used to draw a smiley face on performances that were embarrassing to Denver sports fans, Rockies manager Warren Schaeffer filed this blowout loss in front of a capacity crowd under the heading: “One game out of 162. Don’t worry about it.”

That’s true enough, skipper.

Although after one home game into a new season, the Rockies appear to be the same sad, old story.

Lorenzen, however, is absolutely correct.

It’s too early to panic.

But with urgency, let me be the first person in 2026 to stand up and say:

Sell the team!

I won’t be the last.