Editor’s note: First of a season-long series on the 25th year of Major League Baseball in Denver.
In 1989, a young Denver brewery owner with a hole-in-the-wall bar on skid row desperately tried to dredge up business to a forgotten part of Lower Downtown. He collected 3,200 petitions to keep trains running through Union Station. He lobbied to move an amusement park to an old rail yard. None of it worked.
“The more things that get people down here, especially in the daytime, the better for all of us,” he said at the time. Turns out, what downtown needed was baseball.