This story was excerpted from Thomas Harding’s Rockies Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
DENVER -- Mom’s lesson of preparedness, and the punitive foul pole-to-foul pole running that came with it, is burned in the memory of Rockies rookie pitcher Chase Dollander (Rockies’ No. 1 prospect, MLB’s No. 21 prospect according to MLB Pipeline).
Now, his mother, Sandra Wall, doesn’t remember it exactly as her son does. But a lesson learned is a lesson learned.
In honor of Mother’s Day on Sunday, son and mom looked back at what happened:
The home in Evans, Ga., was always busy. Dollander has two brothers, Hunter, who is older, and Trevor, who is younger. They later gained a stepbrother. Getting kids to their various activities was an undertaking for his mother. Mistakes happen because …
Kids.
“I can’t remember how old I was, but I was really young,” Dollander said. “We were all heading to practice. We had all our cleats and stuff in the garage. We were in a crunch and I grabbed a random pair of cleats. Well, I get to the field, and I have two left cleats.
“My mom is infuriated with me. I have, like, Crocs on. I slipped the Crocs into Sport Mode and went and ran poles because she made me.”
Keep in mind, his mother did not double as coach.
“The coach talked to my mom and he was like, ‘Yeah, I would have done the same thing,’ so they were on the same page,” Dollander said.
Wall, however, didn’t have quite the same memory.
“I don’t think it was me that made him run the poles -- it was probably the coach,” she said. “And I was like, ‘He showed up with two left cleats. What am I supposed to do?'”
Maybe memories become fuzzy. What’s important is that Dollander learned to be responsible and prepared, and he credits his mother for it.
Right, Mom?
“That is really funny,” she said. “I don’t remember it happening that way.
“But if it did, then good for me. Right?”
What’s not in dispute is that mom was always there for Dollander through youth and high school ball, and in college at Georgia Southern and the University of Tennessee -- from which the Rockies selected Dollander ninth overall in 2023.
“What doesn’t a mom do to support her son, right?" Dollander said. “She does anything and everything from, when I was younger, driving me to my games to paying for everything. Now, it’s calling me, giving me words of encouragement, telling me that she’s praying for me.”
They may not share memories of the details of the “two left cleats” incident. They were of the same mind as Dollander dedicated himself to pitching.
“He was around 10 or 11 years old, and he had some soreness,” Wall said. “We didn’t know anything about pitch counts. I took him to a physical therapist and they were like, ‘You really need to start looking at this.’
“So we really started honing in on pitch counts by age. We really made sure we adhered to that number. ‘He’s not going to pitch more than 75,’ or whatever the number was. I really wanted to make sure that he was going to stay healthy.”