Denver’s version of Herm Wehmeier pitched three innings last week, allowing nine hits and five runs, in what very likely was his last Coors Field start for the Rockies.
If indeed that’s the case, it was a bittersweet ending to 10 years with his hometown team for Kyle Freeland.
Wehmeier is not someone many Rockies fans, if any, ever heard of. But he has a lot in common with the Rockies lefthander.
Like Kyle, Herm was a hometown hero who pitched for his hometown baseball team with limited success when it wasn’t very good.
Wehmeier attended Western Hills High in the early 1940s—the same school Pete Rose attended years later.
Back then American Legion baseball was the forerunner of today’s travel ball. Wehmeier won 52 straight games in it and pitched Cincinnati Bentley Post to a national championship in 1944.
“He was one of the greatest natural athletes we ever had in Cincinnati,” then-Reds general manager Gabe Paul once said.
The Reds signed Herm BEFORE he graduated high school. He spent his 1945 spring break in spring training with the Reds then returned to finish his senior year. That prompted Reds manager Bill McKechnie to call the young righthander “a surefire star.”
Sixty-nine years later, the Colorado Rockies made Denver’s own Kyle Freeland their first pick in the 2014 amateur draft. (The draft had not yet been established when Wehmeier signed.)
Pitching for Thomas Jefferson High, Freeland had set a state prep record for strikeouts his senior year, when he had an 8-2 record. Three years later he was a first-team All-American, coming off a 10-2/1.91 season for Evansville University.
Wehmeier debuted September 7, 1945, as World War II was winding down and many Major Leaguers were still serving in the military. He was 18 and nowhere near ready for the Big Leagues. He went 0-4 that month.
He returned to the Reds in 1948 and pitched before his hometown fans for seven-plus, largely mediocre years. He was sold to Philadelphia in June 1954 for slightly more than the waiver price of $10,000—about 3% of what the Brooklyn Dodgers had offered the Reds for him six years earlier.
Despite 47 complete games and nine shutouts, he won only 49 and lost 69 with a 5.25 ERA. He led the National League in walks three times, in wild pitches and hit batsmen twice each, and earned runs allowed once
Freeland began his decade with the Rockies in 2017 by beating the Los Angeles Dodgers 2-1—the first time in 51 years that a starting pitcher made his MLB debut in his team’s home opener in the state where he was born. He went six innings, allowing four hits and LA’s only run.
He finished that promising first season 11-11, but it turned out to be the first of six times he would record double-digit losses.
His career year followed, the only time he had a winning record. He went 17-7 with a 2.85 ERA; just missed pitching a no-hitter against the Chicago White Sox; and finished fourth in Cy Young Award voting.
But in the eight seasons after, his composite record is 41-84 with a 5.21ERA. His 17 losses last year both set a personal worst and led the NL. He finished this year 4-12 with a 6.65 ERA. He pitched the only complete game of his MLB career this season.
Freeland is now a free agent, and he could re-sign with Colorado. But given his performance in recent seasons, it seems likely the Rockies’ new management will move on.
Unlike Wehmeier, who was booed out of town by Cincinnati fans he expected to love him, Freeland has been treated kindly by Rockies’ faithful, who appreciated his intensity, competitiveness and community involvement, while wishing for more seasons like his second in purple pinstripes.
In a tearful interview after his last appearance of 2026 at Coors Field, Freeland called pitching for his hometown team “a dream come true” and recalled growing up a Rockies fan and attending their games as he grew up.
“I never imagined I could wind up playing for them,” he said.
Wehmeier, who told a local writer, “Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to play with the Reds,” left Cincinnati in 1954 and had a winning record (43-39) in four-plus subsequent seasons with Philadelphia, St. Louis and Detroit.
We can only hope Freeland finds similar success elsewhere, if that’s what comes next.
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Denny Dressman writes a weekly sports column for The Villager. You can write to Denny at dennydressman@comcast.net.