Denver Post and the Coors Field Cats
Every Rockies baseball fan who watched the game on April 2 got to watch the video of the long-haired gray cat streaking across the field, desperate to get away from the crowds and the noise.
Twitter lit up with posts about the kitty, exhausted, frightened out of at least two of its lives and the main question was – where did it come from?
I guess this qualifies as a meter-reading story because I know that feral colony of cats very well. I’m quoted in the article.
Elizabeth Hernandez, writer for the Denver Post did some Twitter crowd-sourcing, trying to find anyone who works or worked at Coors Field. Does the Rockies organization know about the intrepid felines that prowl the visible seats and the invisible infrastructure below Coors Field? No one was talking.
I responded to a Tweet by Hernandez and we got to talking. She loves cats, that’s clear. She also loves a mystery and Coors Kitty is one big one, an important story in these times of COVID stress and ad nauseam political firestorms.
The cats were a part of that cycle 20 route in what’s now known as LoDo. When the old buildings were demolished to make way for Coors Field, the cats move on and some moved in.
I imagine after Coors Kitty’s debut, the area is now rife with TNR folks. Chances are good the felines are inside the ballpark rather than outside. There’s now too much competition for free space in the weedy alleys and neglected buildings. Coors Field is like the Kitty Ritz what with a plentiful supply of food, rodents and sewers.
Talking to Hernandez made me miss my reporter days. I loved figuring out how to find people who had the experiences and knowledge I wanted to write about. I never did like stories with facts and figures that make for dry reading but rather I wanted to tell the people side of stories or in this case, the feline side of things.
Wherever the Coors Kitty is tonight, I hope it’s warm and has found a quiet place to wait out the next home crowd at Coors Field and it’ll understand that it’s best to lay low until the shouting is done.