Tony DeMarco

Clint Hurdle has been at his entertaining best during the Colorado Rockies’ unexpected month-long romp to the National League pennant, filling media notebooks and providing high-quality sound bites on a daily basis.

The newly initiated to Hurdle-speak have learned that a clutch performer ‘has a slow heartbeat’, and a pitcher who can get out of jams, ‘works well in traffic’.

Hurdle, intelligent enough to have been offered an Ivy League scholarship a few years before we first saw him as a Sports Illustrated cover boy phenom, also openly has discussed the ups and downs of a life in baseball, and the mixed blessings of raising a 5-year-old daughter born with a rare genetic defect, Prader-Willi Syndrome.

And even on the eve of World Series Game 1 — set for Wednesday night at Fenway Park — Hurdle took the time to explain to those who didn’t already know the touching significance of why he writes the number ‘64’ on each game’s lineup card — in memory of Kyle Blakeman, a teenage football player who died of cancer in August, shortly after a couple of hospital visits from Hurdle and his wife.

Yes, Hurdle is front-and-center again — the lead voice for a team on a historic roll. Which if you’ve been around the Rockies long enough, you get the happy irony here.

You see, that’s the way it used to be around this long-downtrodden franchise. The rebuilding program that coincided with Hurdle’s ascension from hitting instructor to manager in late-April 2002 came complete with growing pains. The Rockies sunk in the standings, and attendance at once always-sold-out Coors Field dwindled as a result.

And as the consecutive losing-seasons streak grew to six in 2006, so did criticism of the organization starting at the top and working down — and even worse, apathy. But you could always count on Hurdle to put a positive spin on the proceedings, to be a human shield of positivism and patience protecting his bosses and players alike.

Then all of a sudden, this Rockies team grew up around him this season — Matt Holliday turned into an MVP candidate, Jeff Francis morphed into a legitimate ace, Troy Tulowitzki burst onto the scene as the next coming of Derek Jeter — and Hurdle quietly moved to the background. When the Rockies got good, Hurdle went low-profile.

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The constant Baseball 101 that used to go on between Hurdle, his staff and the young Rockies dissipated. And the booming voice of the manager was heard less and less in the players’ clubhouse, too.

“I think Clint has changed quite a bit,’’ Holliday said during the National League Championship Series. “When I was a first, or second-year player, we had a lot of first, and second-year players. But as we’ve gotten older, and we have a bit more experience, he’s let us go out and play, and just kind of set back and made the moves he needs to make. I think he has done a great job of transforming.’’

And now here Hurdle is again, media-savvy point man, story teller and life coach — and enjoying every minute of it with his team on the biggest stage of all. Asked about the progression of then-to-now, Hurdle needed paragraphs to capture his emotions:

“It’s one of those things I hold near and dear to my heart,’’ he said. “I really believe we’re prepared for the future through our past. I really believe if we listen and we watch, we can learn. Patience has become a very important tool for me, and it’s not one that’s easily learned.

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“Also, the importance of keeping humility in your back pocket -- one of the best things I was ever told as a young player that I never understood until I was an older player. There are two kinds of people who play this game – those who are humble and those who are about to be. At the age of 18, I laughed, ‘yeah, that’s cute’. Well, by the age of 38, I was wearing it.

“This is something that has a lot of meaning to me -- the fact that it has become something that has become very, very special, that has given our organization value, that has brought joy to a lot of different people on many different levels.’’

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