Keeler: Rockies’ Chase Dollander aced biggest Coors Field debut since Kyle Freeland

Chase The Ace? He’s got the face. And the pace.

“I was pumped up. I just tried my best to keep it kind of low-key a little bit,” Chase Dollander, the Rockies’ brightest pitching hope since Kyle Freeland, said after winning his MLB debut at Coors Field Sunday. “But at times you kind of have to let it eat. And once I got settled, it was really fun.”

Watching Dollander pitch is the most fun you can have sober at 20th and Blake. His four-seam fastball against the Athletics maxed out at 99.3 miles per hour. It hovered between 96 and 99 all day. His cutter topped out at 90.9 mph.

We knew about the heater. Nobody told us about his inner cowboy. The toughness to hang in and hang on when The Ghosts of Coors Past try to buck you halfway to Wazee.

In the fourth inning, Dollander got out of a jam with two men on with one of the prettiest back-to-back whiffs you’ll ever see. The former Tennessee Volunteers star struck out one guy on a breaking ball that dove at the batters’ shins and punched the next hitter out by getting him to swing through a high fastball. If was if the baseball gods had reincarnated a young Ubaldo Jimenez as a country boy from Evans, Ga.

“You know, he’s got a chance,” Rockies skipper Bud Black opined, with classic Buddy understatement. “A real good chance.”

He changed speeds. He threw his slider for strikes. He wasn’t super efficient, mind you, with 49 strikes on 79 pitches, but …

“Six K’s and a walk,” his mother Sandra Wall reminded me in the seventh inning. Firmly. Proudly.

Then she laughed.

“Momma knows.”

Know what else? He won’t back down. When Dollander missed his spot and gave up a 2-run homer in the top of the first, he asked for another ball and finished his first-ever inning  in The Show with a strikeout. His fourth frame would’ve sent half the pitchers in the NL West to the showers and the other half to therapy. The sequence:

Seeing-eye single to right.

Infield hit to third.

RBI single.

Walk on four pitches.

The Rockies led 6-3 with one out and men on first and second. This script could’ve taken about seven twists from there, five of them nasty. Dollander huddled with catcher Hunter Goodman and pitching coach Darryl Scott.

“It was just for me to get a breather and just be able to get back in the zone,” Dollander explained later, “But after that, I just felt a little bit more relaxed and just did what I did.”

Here’s what he does. The rookie fanned Jhonny Pareda on a breaking ball down and in. Then he blew Max Muncy away with a 99-mile-per-hour laser at the batter’s eyelids.

“(Goodman) called fastball up, and the one before, I threw up,” the pitcher recalled. “So I was trying to get it up a little bit more, and I did exactly that. And obviously, I was a little fired up about it. Left some guys out there on the bases. So it was awesome.”

Even more awesome for his family, who tried to keep warm as they watched from Section 129 in matching white DOLLANDER 32 Rockies jerseys.

As he waited for Chase’s first big-league pitch, stepdad David Wall’s right leg twitched like a dog with fleas. Sandra, sitting to his left, kept two hands on her smartphone, filming every step for posterity.

As Dollander warmed up, the public address system played “God’s Country” by Blake Shelton. Sandra and David sang along quietly to forget the cold and calm their nerves.

We turn the dirt and work until the week’s done

We take a break and break bread on Sunday

Then do it all again, ’cause we’re proud to be

From God’s country

When Chase The Ace finished the first by fanning Jacob Wilson on a foul tip, Mom pumped her first.

“There ya go!” she shouted.

“Yes, sir!” David cried.

The Walls are as cool as they come, but the last 96 hours or so had been, to put it mildly, a bit Looney Tunes. Sandra had been driving home from work on Thursday night when Chase called out of the blue.

“It started off as a nonchalant conversation,” she said, “and then all of a sudden, he goes, ‘Well, I’m headed to Denver.’ And it was just screams and tears from there.”

Oh, and this:

“You cannot tell anybody,” Chase stressed.

“Don’t worry,” she replied.

Dollander grace under fire? That’s from Mom. Sandra’s pure steel. When she and Chase’s girlfriend Caroline ran into a Vols fan at the Rockies team store on Saturday and the guy started rambling excitedly about Chase, Wall just bit her lip.

“Tomorrow’s the big day for Dollander,” he said, excitedly.

“It sure is,” Sandra replied, not revealing anything else.

As Wall recalled the story, she laughed again. Harder this time.

“He had no clue,” Sandra chuckled. “And I wasn’t about to tell him.”

Chase’s best friend, Bryce Atchinson, watched from Sandra’s left, in short sleeves, guns out. By the sixth inning, his arms were the same color as the pinstripes on his Dollander jersey.

“Everyone (at Coors) has kind of just been like, ‘Thank you,'” Atchinson said.

Like the man said, dude’s got a chance. A real good chance.

“(Chase) is super humble,” Sandra said. “He really is. And he doesn’t really listen to that. He just kind of chuckles when he hears that.”

Momma knows. Dollander’s first test? Kid aced it.

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