spilborghs-ryanLast night at Coors Field the Colorado Rockies offered up one of those storybook moments, winning the second-longest game in Coors Field history with a walk-off grand slam.

Outfielder Ryan Spilborghs (pictured) stepped to the plate in the bottom of the 14th inning, with his team down 4-2 to the San Francisco Giants. He cracked the second pitch over the wall in right-center field and sprinted around the bases, all while his teammates and the fans who stuck around for nearly five hours went wild.

The Denver Post’s Troy Renck points out that the game featured 15 pitchers and 43 baserunners, and that the win puts the Rockies four games ahead of the Giants in the National League wild-card race, just three games behind the division-leading Los Angeles Dodgers entering today’s three-game series against the Dodgers.

Someone better tell ESPN’s John Kruk, the flamboyant former first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, that the Rockies are legit. He recently said the NL wild card will go to the Atlanta Braves (via Examiner.com). What? The Braves? The same Braves that are four-and-a-half games back in the wild-card race?

The Examiner also quotes Buster Olney, Kruk’s colleague at ESPN and one of the premier baseball writers in America. Olney says that if the Rockies close the gap on the Dodgers this week, it would mark the greatest comeback in history. The Rockies were 15.5 games behind L.A. on June 3, and if they sweep the Dodgers, they’ll be tied.

Olney also claims that the Rockies are the second-best team in the entire league, behind only the New York Yankees, and that he’s now predicting a Yankees-Rockies World Series.

I’ll take Olney’s researched and measured opinion on baseball any day and let Kruk advise me on the best place to grab a cheesesteak in Philly.