Colorado Rockies Unveil Bronze Statue of Larry Walker: “I Don’t Deserve That”

DENVER — While it was fitting that the first player statue at Coors Field would go to the first Colorado Rockies player enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Larry Walker is the last person to talk about his legendary career.

“I’m way too humble of a person to really just think, ‘Yeah, I deserve that.’ I’m more comfortable saying I don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. It’s just easier for me to do all that stuff,” Walker said on Sunday. “But I’m fortunate and grateful that people think that I deserved it, and they put it up there for me. So it’s incredible.”

Rocky Mountain baseball fans showed up well ahead of the 9:30 a.m. ceremony to get a glimpse at a new landmark in LoDo. Walker joked that perhaps only 50 folks would get up that early on a Sunday morning for an occasion like this, but more than a few hundred came to the corner of 20th and Blake to be a part of history.

Notably in attendance at the ceremony were fellow Hall of Famers Todd Helton and Ferguson Jenkins — the first Canadian selected for Cooperstown — as well as former Rockies teammates Vinny Castilla, Denny Neagle, Dave Veres, Mike Lansing, and Jason Bates, as well as the club’s original general manager, Bob Gebhard, who first brought Walker to Denver in 1995.

Several current Rockies — Kyle Freeland, Mickey Moniak, Jake McCarthy, and others — arrived at the ballpark earlier than normal to honor the 1997 National League MVP. Freeland, a Denver native who called Walker his favorite player as a child, was front and center with a youthful sparkle in his 33-year-old eye.

“Being able to see a statue unveiled with him, being able to witness him going to the Hall of Fame, and his number retired here in the stadium, yeah, child Kyle Freeland and adult Kyle Freeland are very happy today. That’s for sure,” said Colorado’s longest-tenured player.

The Player

When Walker was signed by the Rockies to a four-year, $22.5 million deal only days after the 1994-95 work stoppage, he was already an established player with an All-Star selection, two Gold Gloves, and a top-five NL MVP finish to his name.

Coming over from the small-market Montreal Expos and becoming the highest-paid player on the team may have come with certain expectations and pressures, but that wasn’t exactly the case for this five-tool talent.

“Fortunately, the mental part of the game I conquered a couple years in,” Walker said. “I was able to conquer that early, and when I came here, I didn’t have those pressures. I didn’t feel any of it. If I had a bad game, I had a bad game. That’s it. Sometimes I’m going to do great. Maybe I’ll do good, but there’s not a lot where I’m horrible. So those demons never entered my head, and I was able to get through the tough times and not worry about any pressures that anybody was putting on me because I wasn’t putting them on me and I’m the one that’s got to do it. So I never had that feeling in my head.”

Away from the diamond, Larry was an elite teammate who made everyone around him better.

“Larry represented everything you could ask for in a franchise player,” Team President Walker Monfort said during the ceremony. “He played with joy. He played with toughness. He respected the game. He made everyone around him better, and he helped put Rockies baseball on the map.”

The only MVP winner in franchise history, Walker was also a five-time All-Star, seven-time Gold Glove Award winner, and three-time Silver Slugger Award winner during his 17 years in the Majors. In 2020, he was selected by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, some 15 years after he called it quits.

The 59-year-old from Maple Ridge, British Columbia, also took time during the day to look back at his first season with the club in 1995, when he helped lead the Rockies to their first-ever postseason appearance.

“This organization gave me an opportunity to play the game I loved in front of the best fans in baseball. We shared some incredible memories together. The ’95 Wild Card showed that baseball wasn’t just surviving in Colorado, but it was thriving,” Walker said.

For many who turned out for the event, they’ll remember the fun-loving Walker pausing dramatically during his speech in a moment of emotion. Discussing the origins of his passion for the game, which came directly from his father, who is still umpiring baseball at 88 years old, Walker quipped, “I knew that was going to be the hard one.”

The Statue

The bronze sculpture, created by Lundeen Sculptures in Loveland, CO, will greet fans entering the ballpark at the corner of 20th and Blake Street for years to come. Next month, Todd Helton will receive a similar statue on Sept. 19.

The process of capturing the likeness of such a beloved ballplayer was not as simple as looking at a picture, even one as iconic as the one of Walker when he slugged a walk-off home run, his second of the game, on Aug. 18, 1999, against Atlanta.

“We went up (to Lundeen Sculptures) and I was told what to do and how the process goes. I had a uniform I put on and had to hold that pose for, gosh, 20 minutes or so. I started shaking after a while,” Walker recalled. “Fortunately, it was a plastic bat that they gave me, so I didn’t have to hold my own bat. There’s a lot of steps that go into making those things that I had no idea about.”

As Walker’s family helped bring down the purple veil, confetti cannons decorated the sky with purple and white as Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” Walker’s walk-up music for his decade in purple pinstripes, played from the speakers.

“It comes up a lot,” he said of the song. “Even when I’m not around the ballpark, the song comes on the radio, or somebody plays it at an event or something. It’s that immediate feel to give me a bat. Like, ‘It’s go time.’ That song that always brings back the memories of walking from the on-deck circle to home plate at Coors Field.”

Everything After The Ceremony

Despite starting the day happily and 15,000 replica statues being handed out to many of the 28,835 in attendance, Colorado couldn’t send its fans home with the same joy.

A 7-2 loss to the Cleveland Guardians capped a winless homestand. It marked the third consecutive series in which they were swept at home and extended the home losing streak at Coors Field to nine games, both franchise firsts.

During Walker’s time in purple, Coors Field was a fortress. From 1995-98, the Rockies won 60% of their games in Denver. Only the dynasty in Atlanta had a better record in the NL over those four seasons.

“You guys have those low-scoring games here at Coors Field right now, where back then it was (Denver) Broncos scores, so we would have to slug with other teams when they wanted to slug, and we did that,” Walker said before the game. “But it’s great memories to have that. Everybody remembers the Blake Street Bombers and the excitement that we brought to downtown here.”

And now, a semblance of Larry Walker himself will reside in LoDo in what we can only hope, but not expect, will be for eternity.