Colorado Rockies: 3 Things We Didn’t Like Against Arizona

The Colorado Rockies head into the 2016 home opener against the San Diego Padres on Friday with a 2-1 record and a lot of optimism.

After taking two of three games against the Arizona Diamondbacks in the desert, there were plenty of great things that happened for the Rockies to start the season (you can see three things we really liked here). Of course, there were a few things that didn’t go so well against the Diamondbacks.

We know there’s a lot of excitement about the opener at Coors Field, but we’ll play a little Debbie Downer here. In this article, we’ll take a look at three things that we didn’t like in the season-opening series.

The statistics for Jorge De La Rosa and Chad Bettis — These two pitchers were viewed as the stalwarts of the Colorado Rockies rotation headed into the season. Both also came into the season with high expectations. What we saw against Arizona simply didn’t match those expectations.

In 10 combined innings, the duo combined to give up 10 earned runs and 15 hits. They also walked five and gave up three homers. Neither pitcher earned a loss as the Colorado offense came through with six-run innings for both of them. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Rockies won’t do that every game (unless Trevor Story and crew can keep smashing the ball out of the park at historic rates).

De La Rosa is scheduled to go Friday against San Diego in the Rockies’ second home game of the season while Bettis should follow shortly after that (although Saturday’s starter against San Diego has yet to be named by the Colorado Rockies at press time).

By the way, the Padres were outscored by the Los Angeles Dodgers 25-0 in their first series of the season. Any pitcher wanting to lower his ERA likes to hear that a team struggling at the plate is coming to town. We’re looking at you, Jorge and Chad.

The debut of Mark Reynolds — Set to platoon at first base with Ben Paulsen, the right-handed Reynolds got the surprise start in the season-opener against right-handed Zack Greinke. He went 1-for-4 in that game with a strikeout and then followed that with an 0-for-4 day at the plate with two strikeouts on Wednesday.

He’s now a career .229 hitter so maybe a ton shouldn’t be expected. He also entered the season with a 28 percent strikeout rate so the whiffs shouldn’t be a surprise either. However, some were salivating about Reynolds’ potential for power when he was signed to a one-year, $2.6 million contract in December. He had a 44-homer year in 2009 … but he hasn’t hit over .230 since 2009, and hasn’t had a slugging percentage over .400 since 2012.

Charlie Blackmon’s start — Nothing against the Bearded One at all here. He has started the season 1-for-9 … but he hit the ball well against Arizona and some of those shots were simply right at people.

While we don’t love the average, we still love what happens when Chuck Nazty (as he goes by on Twitter) gets on base. He was on base twice against the Diamondbacks with a walk and base hit … and ended up scoring both times.

Next: Colorado Rockies: Pitching Problematic in Loss to D-backs

The Rockies scored 20 runs in the series against Arizona. Just think how the numbers might be even higher if Blackmon, Colorado’s leadoff hitter and one of the leaders in Major League Baseball last season with 43 stolen bases, had started the year hot at the plate.