Rockies Allow Double-Digit Runs to Nats on Consecutive Days

Rockies 5, Nationals 11

Gosh I hope the Rockies can win today. I’m going to the game and it will be my sixth this month. The other five were the sweep by the A’s, the opener loss to the Angels, and the 13-3 win over the Dodgers. Four straight losses were hard to witness. And the way the Rockies have played in this series, it’s probably what I should expect.

Last night, the Rox took a chance on young Edwar Cabrera, a pitcher who is on the 40-man roster but who has never played above Double-A. There were rumors that Jeremy Guthrie would be promoted back to the rotation, or that Drew Pomeranz would be called up from Colorado Springs, but the team opted for Cabrera instead. He’s no Juan Nicasio, it turns out: in other words, not ready.

Cabrera managed a quick first out, but nothing came quickly after that. Even the one strikeout he got, Michael Morse, took 9 pitches. Perhaps the only really impressive thing he did was get Bryce Harper to swing at the first pitch with 2 on and 1 out in the 2nd, producing a double play groundball. Otherwise, Cabrera looked exactly the way we should have guessed he’d look: inexperienced. His best pitch is his changeup, and for some reason he threw only 9 of those in 63 pitches. Instead of relying on that as his outpitch, he stuck primarily to his fastball, which tends to hover around 90 mph. The Nats ate it for dinner. It was ugly.

Also ugly: Wilin Rosario‘s 2 throwing errors during Cabrera’s 2 1/3 innings, which allowed 2 unearned runs. Rosario now has 8 on the season, though it feels like a whole lot more. That’s not the way to get a young pitcher’s confidence up.

Guthrie was slotted to be the bridge today, though he didn’t come in until the 4th. Matt Reynolds took the remainder of the 3rd, and he immediately gave up back-to-back doubles which scored one of Cabrera’s runners and one of Reynolds’s own. THEN Guthrie came in, and had a pretty standard 4-inning outing in which 3 more runs scored. Guys, this pitching experiment is going so GREAT.

The Rockies put in their time at the plate, and I’m sure it was discouraging to watch the Nats’ number of runs grow and grow when they couldn’t keep pace. Most of the starters had at least 2 hits, though driving in runners was a problem as usual. The team stranded 10 runners total. Michael Cuddyer was the LOB killer, leaving 7 on in the course of his 5 at-bats. Case in point: in the 3rd inning the Rockies hit 4 singles but only plated 1 run because a double play and an inning-ending groundout by Cuddy kept everyone else from scoring. Same old same old.

The offense came to life in the final 2 innings, but by then they had quite a deficit to overcome and it proved too much. Tyler Colvin, Jordan Pacheco, Dexter Fowler, and Marco Scutaro each drove in a run, and it was nice to see some clutch hitting finally. But it was too late.

The Nats are a good team, so I’m just going to be happy that we didn’t let them break their runs in a game record again, and that we won’t be swept by them. A split would very very very nice.

The series concludes today with Josh Outman making the forced march to the mound.