Colorado Rockies news and links for Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Who doesn’t love a good promotional deal? For over a decade, the Colorado Rockies have featured the Rockies Taco Special with Taco Bell contingent on whether the team scores seven or more runs. It’s been an integral part of the fan lexicon even if you’ve never actually taken advantage of the promotion. Still, with a struggling offense over the past few years, fans have gotten fewer opportunities to get rewarded. In 2024, the Rockies scored seven or more runs in 37 affairs.
In recent years the Rockies have partnered with McDonald’s for further promotions like in 2023 where fans could get a free 10-piece Chicken McNuggets the day after a Rockies win. After losing 103 games that season, it really wasn’t a helpful deal. In 2024, McDonald’s made things much simpler, offering a free Double Cheeseburger the next day in their app when the Rockies hit a double in a game, regardless of the outcome. I took advantage of this deal plenty in 2024 and it got me wanting to dig deeper into some of the details of how the Rockies did when it came to these Double Cheeseburgers.
In 2024 the Rockies finished seventh in baseball with 277 doubles as a team, doing so in 125 games. The breakdown of the amount of doubles in games is as follows:
- One game with eight doubles
- Three games with six doubles
- Six games with five doubles
- Eight games with four doubles
- 23 games with three doubles
- 48 games with one double
So, in theory, you could have gotten a McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger nearly five times a week during the regular season in Colorado. Each hamburger is priced around $4.09, meaning that you could have saved $511.25 while consuming 56,250 calories. Should you have eaten that many hamburgers you would have also consumed 140,000 milligrams of sodium.
Those numbers also don’t factor in the fact that McDonald’s made the deal contingent on a minimum purchase of $1. It is entirely common for someone to use the deal as an add-on to whatever else they were already getting. Needless to say, it’s not recommended that you take advantage of that deal every single time it was available this year.
An important variable in the deal is that it became active once the Rockies hit their first double of the day. After that first double was hit, everyone else became secondary. For instance, the Rockies had a doubleheader against the Seattle Mariners on April 21 where they had three doubles on the day. Only the double by Jacob Stallings in the first game counted for the deal the next day. This brings us to the next question concerning this deal: who was the Double Cheeseburger Man of the Year for the Rockies?
Thanks to game logs on Baseball Reference, I went through the painstaking process of looking through each box score of the season and pinpointing the first double by a Rockie in each game.
It didn’t take long for the Rockies to get a free burger as Brendan Rodgers laced a double to right field in the second inning on Opening Day against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Nolan Jones and Charlie Blackmon did the honors in the next two games of the series and the Rockies were off and running. In the first month of the season the Rockies failed to get a double seven times, but never going more than two days without one.
May was an improvement as they failed just four times but they did hit a lull late in June. From June 20 through June 29, the Rockies hit just one double over the course of eight games, including five straight games from June 20-25. Even with the All-Star Break things were better in July as well as August, but they got a little inconsistent in late August and early September. From August 26 through September 10, the Rockies went 4-for-10 in terms of hitting a double in a game. They finished the season strong with a nice stretch, capped off by Jake Cave’s double in the final game of the season. At the end of the day, the Rockies went 54-71 in games with a double.
So who is the Double Cheeseburger king?
There were 17 Rockies who secured the Double Cheeseburger double:
- Ezequiel Tovar- 23
- Brendan Rodgers- 15
- Brenton Doyle- 13
- Elías Díaz- 13
- Charlie Blackmon- 11
- Ryan McMahon- 9
- Jake Cave- 7
- Nolan Jones- 6
- Jacob Stallings- 4
- Jordan Beck- 4
- Michael Toglia- 4
- Hunter Goodman- 4
- Elehuris Montero- 3
- Kris Bryant- 3
- Sam Hilliard- 3
- Aaron Schunk- 1
- Sean Bouchard- 1
Tovar led the way with 23 hamburger doubles, accounting for half of his 45 doubles on the year, making him the Double Cheeseburger Man of the Year. Obviously, players who hit in the top part of the lineup tended to get the doubles first. Blackmon hit three doubles as the first hitter of the game, followed by Tovar with two. However, Tovar led the team with eight doubles in the first inning. It becomes more difficult to pinpoint exactly the cheeseburger double numbers but it suffices to say the Rockies had no real trouble with doubles during any given game.
There you have it, the Rockies provided plenty of hamburgers during the season for fans to enjoy. It wouldn’t have been the healthiest thing to each a McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger every day, but the promotions are helpful in giving you something extra to root for in a game. Much like the Taco Special, I found myself hoping someone would get a double each game and it would be one of the first things I check in the box score. When the good times are lean like they are with the Rockies, simple promotions like the McDonald’s one in 2024 served as a little reward for being a fan of the team and that’s all I really needed sometimes and I was lovin’ it.
For a full breakdown of the season calendar, check out the chart below. N/A means they failed to get a double while off-days are designated by OFF.
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Affected by Altitude Episode 136: Low, Low Prices! | Rocky Mountain Rooftop
In this week’s episode, Evan Lang and I talk about the Rockies desire to slash payroll, the hiring of Dustin Garneau as the bullpen coach, and celebrate Brenton Doyle’s Fielding Bible!
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Arizona Fall League
Salt River Rafters 11, Glendale Desert Dogs 7
The Salt River Rafters enjoyed a good day at the plate with every player getting at least one hit in the game. For the Rockies, Juan Guerrero started in left field and went 1-for-3 with an RBI while Skyler Messinger started at first base and went 1-for-4 with a run scored. Carlos Torres also saw some action, tossing a perfect eighth inning on the mound.
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