Rockies pitcher Rex Brothers having fun with the snow at Coors Field on Tuesday. Getty Images

DENVER—The Mets played baseball Tuesday.

That sentence deserves to stand alone. Miracles command a certain amount of respect.

After two mind-numbing days filled with mountains of snow, arctic winds and hours of boredom, the Mets engaged in something that resembled a baseball game on a soggy patch of ground that resembled a baseball field.

It didn't start on time. Almost nobody showed up to watch. But the dirt was brown(ish), the grass was (mostly) green, and baseball happened—a remarkable achievement, considering the only color you could see at Coors Field hours earlier was white.

For the Mets, though, it turned out to be a miserable day—and night—on the field: They were swept in a doubleheader by the Colorado Rockies, losing the opener 8-4 and the nightcap 9-8 in 10 innings.

"We're pretty tired of sitting at the hotel. Everybody wants to get going," Mets manager Terry Collins said. "One of the guys even said, 'If we don't play today, this is going to be the longest four days we've spent in a long time.'"

The first few members of the Colorado Rockies grounds crew arrived at the stadium at around 5:30 a.m., only to discover a field buried in nearly a foot of thick, heavy slush. When team owner Dick Monfort showed up for work about two hours later, head groundskeeper Mark Razum greeted him with this ominous prognosis: "I don't know how we're going to get this done."

Monfort began wracking his brain for ideas—"all crappy ideas," he said. Coors Field has heating coils underneath, but they didn't stand a chance against this much snow. The Rockies considered borrowing large snow-clearing equipment from the NFL's Denver Broncos, but they feared that using it would tear up the field beyond repair.

So Monfort did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed a shovel and started scooping.

That last-ditch act of desperation sparked a grass-roots movement that saved the day. For the next seven hours or so, virtually everybody on the Rockies' payroll assisted Monfort with the cleanup. No, seriously—everybody.

General manager Dan O'Dowd came down to help. So did baseball operations chief Bill Geivett—wearing a giant Montreal Expos jacket. (Geivett worked for the Expos in the mid-1990s.) Even Dinger, the anthropomorphic purple triceratops that serves as the team's mascot, pitched in.

Monfort said he never asked his employees to come shovel. But by the time the effort finally ended, nearly 150 people had helped out, either by shoveling snow or clearing the stands. At one point, the group included Mets general manager Sandy Alderson. The workers shared 75 shovels, prompting Monfort to wonder, "How in the hell can we have this many shovels around?" (They borrowed some from the Broncos.)

"People were coming to work, and they'd see people out there with a shovel. They'd go upstairs, they'd check their emails, and they said, 'I'm going to go help the crowd out,'" Monfort said. "Had we not had 100 or 150 people out there, we'd have never gotten it off."

Considering the state of the Mets' schedule, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Alderson wanted to help. The Mets cannot afford to play another makeup game later in the year. They already need to return to Minnesota in August, giving them a brutal stretch of 33 games in 34 days after the All-Star break.

With another snowstorm expected to blast the Denver area, it seems unlikely the teams will play Wednesday's game. That means for the Mets and Rockies to complete their four-game series, they had to at least attempt to play a doubleheader Tuesday. The Mets don't come to Colorado again this season.

"To have two days in a row off is unheard of," Collins said. "Now you're looking at the possibility of even more. We've got to go out and play."

If the teams can't play Wednesday, they will try for another doubleheader Thursday, meaning the Rockies might find themselves in the same position as Tuesday. Though they managed to get the field ready, Monfort admitted that "the outfield is going to be a little slick."

He added that his knee and back started hurting from the shoveling. "We may have to think about how we are going to do it Thursday to get that game in, too," Monfort said. "I'm sure we'll sit down and talk about some better ideas."

Write to Jared Diamond at