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Lousy AB’s Plague Rockies Again In Loss To Phils

By Michelle Stalnaker

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If the Rockies continue to strike out at this rate, they will continue to lose.

It was a chilly night at Coors Field, but things stayed pretty hot on the field. As has been the trend over the past week or so, the Rockies showed quite a bit of life. I think most fans who have been paying attention have felt hopeful as starters have turned in quality outings and hitters have come through in clutch situations. But it’s not enough. The pieces still aren’t coming together. Some thoughts, in no particular order.

Strikeouts

This one gets a big fat DUH. The Rockies are striking out at a truly alarming rate, and I don’t care if it is Cole Hamels pitching, there is simply no excuse. Even Drew Stubbs ought to be able to foul off a 95-mph fastball every now and then. All you really need to do is read this …

… and then know that the Rockies struck out 11 times last night. Stubbs and Nolan Arenado each had a hat trick. Come on guys. Adam Dunn is getting his feelings hurt.

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Wilin Rosario

Gosh, I was really excited to see Rosario play first in person. And by excited I mean, very incredibly nervous and scared. And Rosario pretty much performed how I thought he would, at least initially. In the first inning, with Ben Revere at first, Freddy Galvis hit a ground ball to Rosario’s right. He fielded it fine, but lost track of his feet and then sailed his throw to DJ LeMahieu, and everybody was safe. The call at first was an out until Ryne Sandberg, who had a lot of issues with just about everything in the first inning, asked for a review. My own personal review of the footage confirmed that Rosario did not step on the bag. I get that he is not an everyday first baseman, but if he can’t do the little things right, he shouldn’t be in the field at all.

The good news is that Rosario did get better from there. He helped finish three double plays and caught a line drive off Carlos Ruiz‘s bat. He didn’t mess up anymore defensive plays, and he even got things going from the plate a couple of times, collecting two hits and stealing a base. I do not want him at first base, though, unless he’s a runner, so I really hope that AL teams with good pitchers to offer on trade were watching.

Jordan Lyles

I found Lyles’s outing to be about 75% impressive. He struggled hard in the first inning when the Phillies were driving the ball all over the field, but after that he made his adjustments and started inducing weak contact. He still gave up a couple of loud outs, but he held the Phils to one run over their first five innings. And then he threw two bad pitches in a row which broke open the game. One was a fastball that Odubel Herrera hit over Carlos Gonzalez‘s head. The second was a slider that Ruiz dropped in front of Cargo. LeMahieu had a very unfortunate role in all this; his relay throw the plate on Herrera’s double was way off line, allowing Herrera to reach third and score easily on Ruiz’s single. That would turn out to be the winning run. I don’t blame Lyles for this entirely, because he really did pitch well on the whole. But with this Rockies team, a three-run deficit is insuperable in a way that it wasn’t in the past. Lyles kept his team in the game until those two pitches.

Momentum

LeMahieu made that bad throw, but his real crime in last night’s game was killing the rally the Rockies had going in the bottom of the 4th. Rosario led off with a single, and with one out Stubbs doubled (it was more like a bloop single that three guys tried to catch and couldn’t). So LeMahieu comes to the plate with one out and two runners in scoring position and strikes out on four pitches. Up next: Jordan Lyles, who predictably struck out himself. Had LeMahieu been able to take a walk, that would have loaded the bases and given Lyles the chance to try for a sac fly or something (he did hit a long flyball in the second). Obviously Hamels tends to hit his spots, so if the walk wasn’t there, LeMahieu could have at least gotten the ball out of the infield and allowed the run to score. That would have been the fourth run the Rockies needed to go to extras. But the K killed it, and the inning was basically over.

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Other momentum-mutilators: Rosario striking out in the 8th with 2 on and 1 out, Stubbs and Arenado bookending the 9th with strikeouts when a LeMahieu triple and Charlie Blackmon single put a run on the board, and a bizarre bunt pop-up by Blackmon on Hamels’s first pitch of the game. Of course there was no rally to kill at that point, but it was weird, and it did not get things off to a very good start.

Jonathan Papelbon

Can we all just agree that we hate him now and forever and we want him to blow every single save opportunity he has for the rest of his career? At least we got to pin one run on him.

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