Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,788
By This is the grave of Jerry McMorris.
Born in Rock Island, Illinois in 1940, McMorris grew up in the trucking world. His dad owned a small trucking company and McMorris decided to start his own when he was an adult. This became Westway Motor Freight. It changed names over the years with mergers, becoming NW Transport and NationsWay Transport. It doesn’t matter much but owning this made McMorris a lot of money.
The way McMorris decided to spend that money was getting involved in the world of baseball. In 1991, Major League Baseball decided to give an expansion team to Denver, which became the Colorado Rockies. No one is sure if this really counts as Major League Baseball thirty plus years later. But still, Major League teams to play the Rockies and routinely eviscerate them. Anyway, McMorris was a minor partner in the team that won the bid. Michael Monus was the big guy in that. But then Monus got all caught up in scandals around his business practices and he had to withdraw from the group. That created a leadership vacuum and a money vacuum too. Colorado nearly lost the team to Tampa Bay when it couldn’t come up with the promised money. McMorris led a reorganized group to raise the needed $20 million extra and he became principal owner due to that.
Today, the Rockies are such a total disaster. It’s hard to remember what a revelation that team was in its first years. A lot of that had to do with the gorgeous Coors Field, one of the first character heavy parks built in the 1990s. Along with Camden Yards, this revolutionized the fan experience. You could sit up high and see the sun set over the Rockies, I mean what could match that? The product on the field was at least entertaining–one thing the Rockies have almost always been able to do is score runs. It’s just that the other team tends to score more runs. McMorris really wanted to bring a winner to Colorado and invested the money to do so. The first idea on how to deal with all the runs was to throw a lot of money at good pitchers and bring them to Denver. Plenty were happy to take it, but signing Denny Neagle and Darryl Kile and Mike Hampton just didn’t work out. None of them succeeded with the Rockies. But still, people had fun at Rockies game. It culminated in the team hosting the All-Star Game in 1998.
The problem for McMorris is that he lost most of his money. His trucking business fell apart and he was forced to sell a big chunk of the team to the Monfort family. They slowly bought more and more and forced him out in 2005. Under his ownership, the Rockies never won more than 83 games, had four times with winning seasons (82 or 83 wins) and made the playoffs once. But it’s not like anyone has done better with the Rockies. They have their fluke World Series appearance, but that’s it and the team is completely moribund today. Hell of a lot easier to get Coors Field tickets today than when I first went in 1995.
McMorris died seven years after being forced out of ownership. He had pancreatic cancer and that killed him in 2012. He was 71 years old.
Jerry McMorris is buried in Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery, Wheat Ridge, Colorado.
If you would like this series to visit other baseball owners, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Charlie Comiskey is in Evanston, Illinois and George Steinbrenner is in Trinity, Florida. C’mon, you know you want a Steinbrenner visit. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.