Is there a f*cking Rockies game today? Here's a website with the f*cking answer

For baseball fans, April is one of the sweetest times of the year: It signifies beer and sunshine and hot dogs, renewed hope and the pop of a ball in a leather glove. But for anyone who lives or works or has business in LoDo, baseball season -- and especially Colorado Rockies day games -- also means nightmare traffic, delays, closed streets and revelers too drunk to pay attention to traffic signals. In other words, it's important to know if there's a fucking Rockies game. And luckily, there's a fucking easy way to find out.

A couple of years ago, Eric Baer and a few co-workers at ReadyTalk, a video-conferencing company with offices at 16th and Wewatta streets, were taking the 16th Street Mall shuttle to lunch when they noticed a swarm of people downtown.

"Is here a fucking Rockies game?" one of them asked. There was, and Baer decided that the question might make for a fun website, one that would answer it and help people decide whether they wanted to be in LoDo that day or not.

"We passed it around the company, and everyone started using it as a tool-slash-fun thing," says Baer, who moved to Seattle last summer for a different job but hopes to return to Denver. "It's always such a mess there for anyone who works downtown."

All you have to do is click on IsThereAFuckingRockiesGame.com, and the website will tell you. For instance, today, April 9, the answer is: " YES. It's a fucking home game. The Rockies play the fucking White Sox at 1:10pm EDT @ Coors Field" (see picture above). The only other adornments are purple pinstripes in the background.

This is the third season that Baer has maintained the site, which is located on an open-source platform so that anyone who wants to make a site for their city can do so. He tried setting up similar sites for the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox but didn't get any traction. "The fans didn't find it very funny," Baer says.

But Denverites seem to like it. "Traffic to the site isn't enormous, but it's pretty consistent," notes Baer, who says he's a baseball fan himself, despite the problems that home games caused him. "There are quite a few regulars in town who check it."

And on Monday, one of them sent Baer $5 for a beer as a thank you via a Paypal link on the site. "That was the first time I've received a beer from the buy-me-a-beer button," says Baer, "so that made it all worthwhile."

More from our Sports archive: "Photos: Colorado Rockies fans celebrate Opening Day in LoDo."