Editor’s note: Colorado Rockies rookie Clint Barmes has been keeping a regular diary throughout the 2005 season. Sadly, he suffered a clavicle fracture in June in the midst of what was shaping up to be an outstanding year for him offensively. Nevertheless, he has continued to keep his diary despite the injury, and is looking forward to resuming play in September. Continuing from where he left off in June, we are pleased to bring you further excerpts from the diary of this budding superstar.

June 8. Two days ago, I fell down in my apartment and broke my shoulder blade bone. Drat! This season was turning out so great and now I won’t be able to play until September if I’m lucky. The team sent me a “Get Well” card while I was in the hospital, which cheered me up a bit. Even the vets signed it, which was really nice of them. It just goes to show — what goes around comes around. Because of my cast, I won’t be able to play the vintage pinball machine we bought for our clubhouse. It serves me right for getting it scratched in the first place.

Mr. [General Manager Dan] O’Dowd actually took time out of his busy schedule to visit me. He told me to get well soon and reminded me to visit his office when I got out of the hospital. Even though I got hurt, I’m still getting paid by the Rockies so Mr. O’Dowd said that it wouldn’t be fair for me to get paid for doing nothing. That makes sense, obviously. He said they’ll have a bunch of little jobs for me to do over the next few months.

June 17. Work has been a bit boring so far. I’ve been answering phones in the front office and ordering supplies when we run out of stuff. It’s hard to move around with my cast so I’m not capable of doing much else right now. My cubicle is near Mr. O’Dowd’s office and I can hear him yelling on the phone all day long. GM’s need to yell in order to appear tough and get what they want. Not me, though, I have to be nice to people on the phone and in person, even when they pass too close to my desk and bash into my cast with their purses and mail carts.

June 30. Somebody from the MLB head offices called for Mr. O’Dowd today. After he finished speaking with them, I heard him yelling a lot of nasty words in his office. He sounded very frustrated. A few minutes later, he came out to talk to me.

“Kid”, he said, “we were supposed to have submitted some team drug testing results to the commissioner’s office by today. They’re flying somebody into Denver today and we’ve got to have something to show him. The rest of the boys are on the road so you’re the only one here. Go immediately to the team doctor, produce a sample, and take it to the lab for analysis. Then bring the results back here to my office as soon as they’re ready”. I couldn’t believe it! This was a major responsibility, like a two outs, bottom of the ninth, down by a run responsibility! It was the most important job Mr. Dowd had ever given me and I didn’t want to disappoint him.

I went to see the doctor and he gave me a little plastic cup. I drank three cans of Mountain Dew and excused myself to the bathroom. Once I was in there, I realized I had a major problem. One of my arms is held in place by my cast, which means I can’t bend it. Normally, I would have held my thing in one hand and the cup in the other, but with the cast that wasn’t possible. I kept trying to position my thing so that it would stay pointing in the right direction, but it kept moving off to one side. I was too embarrassed to tell the doctors about the situation so I finally decided to put the cup on the edge of the toilet seat and aim carefully with the help of my good arm.

Well, my aim was fine but I guess I did it too hard because the cup got knocked off the seat onto the floor. I had to hold it in — which was really really difficult because I drank all that Mountain Dew — while picking up the cup and cleaning the floor with some paper towel. Then I put the cup back, aimed again, and let it go a lot slower the second time. That worked great! After all that, I had a new problem — screwing the lid onto the cup using only one arm! Some of the skin on one of my fingers got caught between the lid and the cup and I started bleeding. Oh no! A bit of blood got into the cup but it was only a little bit so I don’t think anyone will notice.

After getting the results from the lab, I headed straight to Mr. O’Dowd’s office, just like he’d asked. Everything had taken a lot longer than I’d expected, though. A couple of the office interns were hanging out there reading some reports, so I gave my test results to them. They said that the guy from MLB had already been there for two hours. Mr. O’Dowd had been stalling for time and was down at the batting cages with the man from MLB.

“Hey, have you guys been snooping in the MLB guy’s bag and reading his reports?” I asked them. They chuckled to themselves. “Barmes, have you heard of stanozolol?”, they asked back. “Oh my, do I have a disease?”, I exclaimed. “Please don’t tell Mr. O’Dowd what I have, I’ll take medicine and get better, I promise! I just want to play ball in September!”. The interns looked confused. “No, you don’t understand, we found this report and it says …”

I cut them off. “Whatever it is, Mr. O’Dowd doesn’t need to know. Am I sick? Todd Helton won’t let me race ATV’s again if he thinks I’m sick!”. After a moment, two big smiles came to their faces. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious. We’ll explain everything to Dan for you. Don’t worry about a thing”. I left them alone and went back to my desk. What a stressful day!

July 7. Work has been a bit bleh lately. I was talking with the interns during lunch today and they wanted to play a little joke on Mr. O’Dowd. They thought it would be funny to give him a taste of his own medicine by calling him and yelling while pretending to be another GM. All of them agreed that it would be funniest if I was the one making the call. I didn’t like the idea at all, but I owed these guys a favor after they covered up for me last week. Mr. O’Dowd was out of the office, so I called his voice mail and pretended I was Jim Bowden from the Nationals.

“Hello Mr., uh, Dan, this is Jim calling from Washington. I am angry!! We’re in first place right now and we’re going to stay there. Grrrrr! We’re going to make the playoffs and you’re not! Our team rules and yours doesn’t, what do you think about that? Do you think that any of your boys could make our roster? Do you? We like that rookie Barmes, but I’m sure you won’t want to give him up. That Preston Wilson is a solid player too. We’d like to have him, but we won’t give up anything more than a crappy pitcher and outfielder for him, because our team is better than yours! Call me if you want to talk trades. Bye bye.”

That was more or less what I said. Getting angry was a lot more difficult than I expected — I’m just not an angry person! I put in a nice word for Preston since he’s always been so nice to me. The interns thought the joke was super funny and they laughed about it for the rest of the day, so I guess it was worth it to see other people so happy because of something I did. Now we’re all wondering how Mr. O’Dowd will react. I think he’ll laugh about it too.

July 13. WHOOPIE! I got to go to the All-Star Game! Not to play, of course, but as [Rockies All-Star pitcher] Brian’s [Fuentes] personal assistant. On Monday, after doing Brian’s unpacking back at the hotel, I headed to the ballpark to meet some of the players. The best part was getting Albert Pujols’ autograph on a baseball. I had to line up for an hour but it was worth it. Then I picked up Brian’s uniform from the cleaners and oiled up his glove in preparation for the game the next day. While I was doing that, Jimmy Rollins came into the equipment room and said he needed a bat, quick. He’s a fellow shortstop so I wanted to help him out. “What’s it for?”, I asked, but he snapped back “You’re asking too many questions, kid, just find me a bat”. I didn’t bring any bats with me, but it sounded like he was in a big hurry, so I gave him Brian’s batting practice bat. Brian isn’t a very good hitter so he uses a corked bat in batting practice, just like Sammy Sosa used to do. Jimmy was in such a rush, he ran out before I could tell him what kind of bat it was. Anyhow, I finished with Brian’s glove and arrived in the clubhouse lounge in time to see the last few first round homers by Bobby Abreu on TV. Wow, he was launching balls all over the place! How did he do that? Later, I heard the announcers say that he’d cracked a bat and started using one of Jimmy Rollins’ bats instead. Jimmy must have found his own bats and didn’t end up using the one I gave him. I should remember to call him and get Brian’s bat back before he notices that it’s missing. He’ll understand, because we’re both shortstops and shortstops know how to be real with one another.

The All-Star Game itself was fun to watch, even though we lost. Boo! Brian didn’t get to pitch, either. Double boo! When I got back to Denver, I learned that Preston had been traded. Mr. O’Dowd must have thought that our joke last week was funny because he made a trade with the real Jim Bowden so he couldn’t have been angry at him. Maybe my good word helped out because Mr. Bowden must like Preston also, or else he wouldn’t have wanted him to come to Washington. I’m a little sad that I didn’t get back in time to say goodbye to Preston, though.

August 4. Everyone around the office is talking about the Rafael Palmeiro drug test. Not only did he test positive for steroids, but he tested positive for that stanozolol thing that I had too! It must have been some sort of cold and gone away quickly, because I haven’t felt sick at all! I didn’t test positive for steroids, but otherwise, I’ve got something in common with a future Hall of Famer! I think it’s a good sign — could this mean that I’ll be a Hall of Famer someday too?