Look back at how the “environmental Chamber” at 20th and Blake impacted baseball

Jason Jennings, a former right-hander in the Rockies, laughed at the absurdity.

“Yes, of course, the humidor made a difference,” he said. “It 100% made a difference. For pitchers, it was about surviving.”

It’s been 20 years since Jennings was the runaway winner for National League rookie of the year, and 20 years since the Rockies began storing baseballs inside a humidor in an attempt to bring some semblance of baseball sanity to Coors Field.

The Denver Post published the story 20 years ago.

“At long last, the Colorado Rockies have discovered a way to tame baseball at altitude,” former Post Rockies beat writer Mike Klis wrote. “This is not a rehash of the dismantling of the Blake Street Bombers. The Rockies did not suddenly draft a group of 100-mph-throwing pitchers. The groundskeepers didn’t, as Clint Hurdle suggested last Wednesday, find the altitude plug at Coors Field and stick it back in,

“This is about the humidor. A baseball humidor.”

Or, as Keli McGregor, the Rockies’ late team president preferred to call it, “an environmental chamber.”

After the 2001 season, The Rockies started building the chamber. Eight days before their home opener against Houston on March 31, the Rockies began humidifying baseballs.

20 years later, Major League Baseball teams keep their baseballs in a humidor to ensure even playing fields, regardless the temperature and humidity at each stadium. MLB decided to set the humidor to one setting — 70 degrees and 57% relative humidity — across all parks except for mile-high Coors Field, which uses 65% relative humidity.

“I didn’t have an issue with it before, and I can see the value of it now,” said Dr. Meredith Wills, a sports data scientist who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics. “We’ve seen how it’s worked in Colorado and Arizona with dry conditions. In humider areas, the humidor will dry out the baseballs.

“The humidor is supposed to replicate the bounciness of the ball off the bat, in every park. The point of the humidor is that the balls react the same and should all end up around the same weight.”

Now, however, as it was 20 years ago there is much controversy about how MLB cares to its baseballs, and how that affects our game.

“Nobody knows,” Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw, a three-time Cy Young Award winner, recently The Los Angeles Times. “Whatever MLB says, they dont know either. … Every way they rub up the ball is different. Every ball they make are different. Every way they apply mud to the ball is unique. They check guys every single way. It’s all a crapshoot. Nobody knows. Whatever MLB thinks is going to happen, it’ll probably be the opposite.”

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MLB’s first humidor was the brainchild of Tony Cowell, electrician and crew foreman who helped build the ballpark at 20th and Blake. He was bothered by Coors Field’s infamous reputation.

After McGregor’s 2001 season, Cowell began brainstorming. Cowell had an idea for a humidor while on a hunting trip at 10,000ft.

“I was elk hunting in the Flat Top Wilderness when the thought popped into my head,” recalled Cowell, 60. I was out hunting, and I had on an old pair leather hunting boots that got all muddy.

“Then they dried out and they got really uncomfortable. I remember thinking, ‘I hate the way these things shrink up when they dry out. I was able to combine two and two. ‘Wait a minute, my boots are made of leather. A baseball’s outsides are made out of leather. It’s not just about the altitude. The baseballs are drying out, just like my boots.’ ”

It is clear that the humidor was a game changer at Blake and 20th.

“I really didn’t have an expectation of its effect, but I certainly was hopeful when we installed it,” former Rockies general manager Dan O’Dowd said. “The humidor didn’t necessarily help lower our team’s ERA, post-humidor, but the home runs dropped dramatically. It definitely helped normalize the game to some degree.”

But current Rockies left-hander Kyle Freeland, who was born and raised in Denver, doesn’t see the humidor as complete salvation for pitchers at Coors, especially when hot, dry weather arrives in July and August.

“Baseballs at sea-level feel still a little bit softer and a little bit easier to grip than they do here,” Freeland said. “And in my opinion, by the time the balls get out of the humidor and sit in those bags where they’re stored pregame, it doesn’t have (as much) effect.

“Because I’ll get a baseball from the umpire and it will feel slick and chalky and the mud isn’t allowed to settle into the leather. You have to keep rubbing the ball with saliva, sweat, and whatever else to get a firm grip. The ball is still different than in L.A. or San Diego.”

Still, 20 years of statistics show the humidor has helped Rockies pitchers, while also hurting the club’s hitters.

From 1995 to 2001, Colorado’s average team ERA was 6.14 and the pitching staff gave up an average of 126.7 home runs per season. From 2002 to 2021, however, the average ERA fell to 5.06 while home runs dropped to 98.8 each season.

Pre-humidor, the Rockies’ batting average at Coors was .328 and they hit 128.3 homers per season. Post-humidor, this average dropped to.295 while home runs plummeted to 103.2 per year.

There were other elements, however.

In response to the so-called “steroid era,” MLB implemented league-wide performance-enhancing drug testing in 2003.

In 2019, “juiced baseballs” resulted in 6,776 home runs hit during the regular season, which shattered the previous MLB record, set in 2017, by nearly 11%. The 2019 Coors Field record for most home runs was held by the Rockies’ pitchers, who tallied 144. Colorado’s 1999 pitching corps gave up 159 homers.

The first year of the humidor saw runs drop 11 percent at Coors Field, across the board, from 2001. Even more telling, the Rockies posted their lowest ERA (5.47) and batting average (.312), easily eclipsing the marks of 5.67 in 1997 and .316 in ’95.

Former Rockies’ first baseman Todd Helton gave a thumbs-up to the humidor, telling The Post at the time, “I like the way the games have been going. It’s a lot more fun for the fans, for us. It’s actually easier to hit that way when the games don’t take as long. You don’t have to be on the field for forever. It’s okay if our pitchers like it. That’s all that matters to me.”

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In September 2001, Jennings made a good start at Coors. However, his next outing was a complete disaster. He was only there for 1/3 of an inning, giving up seven earned runs on seven hits and two walks against the Padres.

For Jennings, and other Rockies pitchers of the pre-humidor era, the biggest problem wasn’t that baseballs carried farther at altitude. Their complaint was that they couldn’t get a proper grip on the ball.

“The problem was, the baseballs would shrink,” Jennings recalled. “The balls would dry up and you couldn’t feel the seams. It was crazy. I mean, it was like, ‘You expect us to pitch against the Barry Bonds of the world, a mile above sea level, with a cue ball?’ Which is basically what we were throwing.

“The (clubhouse attendants) would rub the balls up with the mud they used and that did us no good. The mud was basically turned into a dry powder in Colorado. Then we’d have to wipe that away.”

Jennings stated that he was able to grip the ball better starting in 2002, when he had a 16-8 record with a 4.52 ERA.

Jennings and relief pitchers Tom Martin (and Brian Fuentes) combined for a one hit, 6-0 win over Oakland at Coors Field. Ken Macha, Athletics manager, was caught in a conspiracy after he was not on the right side of the first one-hitter at Denver.

“I still feel the (humidor) should be investigated,” Macha said. “Maybe we ought to do that at our ballpark. The ball’s the same weight, but they are sitting in there and getting moisture, so I don’t understand that. It’s like getting your golf ball out of the water — find one out of the water — and you hit that.”

Giants Cy Young Award winner Tim Lincecum, a 2010 Giants Cy Young Award winner, essentially accused the Rockies cheating. Lincecum suggested that they used nonhumidor baseballs when they got to the plate.

“(Expletive) juiced ball. This is (expletive),” Lincecum was caught on camera saying.

MLB made changes to the way that baseballs were inspected at Coors after Brian Sabean (General Manager Giants) complained. Under the new procedure, umpires began carrying bags of balls out of the humidor and placing them in Colorado’s dugout where they remained in the umpires’ view.