Rockies

The city took to it immediately: that debut season drew 4,483,350 fans through the gates, a single-season attendance record that stood as the clearest sign of how quickly the Rockies became Denver's team rather than an import.

The thin air turned Coors Field into the sport's most notorious hitter's environment, and the club has leaned into that rather than away from it — the record for solo home runs in a game, eight of them against the Marlins in 2016, belongs to Colorado, and so does a 23-run outburst against the Athletics. Larry Walker built his case for Cooperstown in that ballpark, winning the National League MVP in 1997 before his number went up on the wall; Todd Helton did the same across a longer career spent entirely in purple.

What the club has not done is win it all. The only World Series appearance came in 2007, and it arrived through a stretch fans still call "Rocktober" — fourteen wins in the final fifteen games, a 13-inning survival against San Diego to clinch the Wild Card, then sweeps of the Phillies and Diamondbacks that carried Colorado into the Series against Boston, where the run ended. It remains the franchise's only pennant, against five Wild Card berths and no division title in the NL West, a gap that the rivalry with the Diamondbacks and the Dodgers has done nothing to close.

The Monfort brothers have owned the team since its early years, steering it through the ordinary business of a small-market club chasing bigger-spending division neighbours. None of that has touched what Coors Field became: a ballpark where 46,891 seats fill with purple, and where the altitude keeps writing the record book on its own terms.