Todd Helton, Jeff Francis and more than a dozen other Colorado Rockies are showing off their acting skills in the club's first full-fledged television advertising campaign since 1993, its inaugural year.

The effort is built around the letter R and is an extension of the Generation R promotion rolled out a couple of years ago to showcase the team's young homegrown players.

In recent years it hasn't been a product that sold itself. Creating excitement and luring fans has been difficult. Coors Field attendance has fallen sharply, and the team has suffered six losing seasons in a row.

Jill Roberts, the Rockies' senior director of advertising and marketing, said the ads are not a sign of desperation.

"We've had a lot of the same players for two or three years, or more, and fans are getting used to them," she said. "We were ready to unveil a different dimension of the players, a more lighthearted one, that fans haven't seen."

In one commercial, Helton, Matt Holliday, Garrett Atkins and Brad Hawpe swing for the fences in batting practice, admiring the balls sailing into the stands. Helton, the team's veteran, finally nails the Rockies' mascot, Dinger, in the bleachers.

In another, pitchers Francis and Aaron Cook sit inside the humidor, typically reserved for cigars but used to store baseballs at Coors Field to counter the effects of altitude, keep balls from getting too dry and traveling too far. They smell each baseball, tossing the fragrant balls - like the "sweet change-up" - into one bag and the nasty one - the "hanging curveball" - into a sack labeled "visitors."

The creative work and editing was done in-house, Roberts said, with Seattle-based Blue Goose Productions handling cameras, lighting and sound.

The commercials will appear in Colorado on an array of Comcast stations, Roberts said. The theme also is seen on billboards, in print and on the radio.

In 1993, the team introduced itself to Colorado with its "baseball at a whole new level" promotion, but it has not repeated anything on that scale until now. The Rockies have done simple TV advertising over the years featuring highlights, she added.

The Rockies reeled in large crowds in the mid-to-late 1990s, and advertising arguably was moot with people clamoring for seats in the new LoDo park. But attendance later dropped significantly, hitting bottom in 2005 at around 24,000 per game. The team finished that year with an ugly 67-95 record.

Roberts, however, said the team is on the "upswing."

Last year, attendance crept up to roughly 26,000, and the club's record improved to 76-86.

patonj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2544