'Star Wars' Night with the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field Recap: 'Star Wars' is Baseball

Written by Joel T. Lewis

I remember my first ball game. We were living in Hayward California and my Dad got tickets to see the Oakland A’s play at the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum with some of his buddies in the Marine Corps. I remember tailgating in the stadium parking lot, chasing after balls I couldn’t quite catch yet with kids I didn’t know, whose parents I didn’t know but it didn’t matter. That day felt different. We had all come together for something special, something that would reframe in my mind what baseball was. I don’t know who won, I don’t know what the score was, but I remember walking out and seeing that crisp green grass, and that rich brown alleyway lined with white chalk, that perfect, pure arena under an open sky and it was magic.

​There’s a moment in every ball game I’ve been to since that I attend as an adult (most of them at Coors Field), when the murmur of the crowd, the booming familiarity of the announcer swell and fade like the waves of the ocean, and I look out at the sun’s dying light and those lights burst to life, and I see that pure green, brown, and white diamond stretched out in front of me, and that magic returns. Doesn’t matter the seats, the company, the score, or the opponent, being at the ballpark fills me up in a way that few things do.

This past weekend I got a bit of that magic dear readers and a whole lot more. Through Nerds That Geek I was fortunate enough to receive press credentials for one of my favorite nights in baseball: Star Wars Night at Coors Field. I didn’t know what to expect as we ascended the elevator heading for the Press Room. I wasn’t ready. The emotion, the wave of joy, of childhood hopes never before manifested or imagined, staggered me. It was like magic. It was like seeing a ballpark for the first time again. To watch a game start from that room, to see the pitch move toward you in that room you’ve seen in the movies, was spectacular. That room, so familiar and yet so lofty, unattainable. I got to be in that room. I got to see baseball happen in that room. Readers this is an event centered on Star Wars, the lifeblood of the nerd laying these words out before you. I’ve only mentioned the theme once. This is how large baseball looms in my life, how ever-present it seems, and it’s frighteningly similar to the role Star Wars plays in my life.

I don’t remember a time in my life when I hadn’t seen Star Wars, there’s no grand crossover, no dark period before the guiding light of sabers. It feels built in, like a standard feature of my brain. It seems quaint now to think of the deflation, of the loss I felt walking out of Revenge of the Sith after seeing it for the first time. Not because I disliked the movie, (we can discuss prequel opinions at another time), but because I knew Lucas would never make another one, that it was the end of Star Wars on the big screen. It hurt, it was unfair. I got to hear the Star Wars Main Title in the theater, and watch the crawl, a ritual that I’d enacted at home so many times that I exhausted my poor Dad who had to read the bright golden space traveling words to me because I couldn’t myself yet. I was losing the ability to feel that novelty, to feel the magic of that opening fanfare and iconic beginning in person, in the place it was meant to be felt.

That fanfare has stopped me dead in my tracks out shopping, on the street, hearing it from another room. The feeling of excitement, of impending adventure is something I feel at the start of every screening of a Star Wars film (and I go to a financially inadvisable number of them nowadays) and every time I hear that song. It’s magic. It’s just like baseball.

Baseball and Star Wars have a lot more in common than just the magic of nostalgia. You can easily pick out the good guys from the bad guys by looking at the colors of their clothing for one thing. Star Wars began as the functional fusion of allegory and melodrama, so much so that the heroes wear heroic white (Leia and Luke) and the villains wear villainous grey and black (Vader and Tarkin). Even Han Solo’s outfit speaks to that character’s nature. A dingy, white tunic under a thin black vest speaks to Han’s rather thinly veiled heart of gold. His brusque roguish charm is merely a facade he puts on to hide how much he cares about people. Baseball is much the same way. The ‘villains’ wear different colored jerseys and you can identify them quickly and boo them appropriately.

There’s also a sense in both Star Wars and Baseball of a larger story, an expansive universe. You watch the colorful assortment of aliens, characters, and ships in Star Wars and you imagine the vastness of that world, of all those tiny points of light in the opening crawl and the richness of those millions of cultures. Star Wars feels big. Baseball is much the same. After over a century of history and 2,430 games a season today stepping into a ballpark feels big too. You feel the weight of those age old rivalries and the stories of the different series as you watch a single game. You’re hooked into to something bigger the way it feels when you’re watching Star Wars.

Both of these pastimes produce larger than life figures. When the moniker ‘iconic’ comes up in conversation the King of Crash is right up there with Jedi Master Yoda. The things these almost mythic characters do, whether its lifting an X-Wing out of a swamp, or sending a ball careening out of the park inspire the imagination, they delight us with their feats of focus, power, and determination. Ball players and Star Wars characters also share one of the coolest trappings of notoriety: they both have theme songs! They’re announced with a flourish of sound and whether it’s The Outfield’s ‘Your Love’ (in my opinion the greatest walk-up song in history so kudos to Charlie Blackmon) or John Williams’ ‘Imperial March,’ you know who’s coming into frame or up to bat before they appear. This shared allure makes Jeter, Griffey Jr., and Aaron seem just as otherworldly and larger than life as Solo, Skywalker, and Dameron do.

I can’t even count the number of times I’ve twirled a baseball bat accompanied by a self-generated signature thrum of a lightsaber. Thematically the two are very similar. They’re both pastimes passed from parents to their children, infused with a rich nostalgia spanning multiple generations and they’re all the better for the sharing. The feeling of community, of belonging that the Star Wars community is capable of (though more recently they’ve been using their powers for evil rather than good) is that ballpark experience. It’s being dazzled by the brightness of the lights, the crisp green of the turf, and the booming familiarity of the ballpark announcer.

Star Wars Night at Coors Field is an event that seamlessly fuses two of America’s greatest pastimes. It’s a marriage of themes and philosophies, spectacle and imagination that few sporting events achieve. It was a delight and an honor to attend as a member of the press and I look forward to returning to a galaxy far, far away and to a sandlot larger than life very soon. Until Next Time, Geek On!

---