Colorado Rockies: Here comes another grueling stretch

This is beginning to sound like a broken record. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about this topic but, once again, the Colorado Rockies enter another grueling juncture in the schedule. This time, they play 17 games in, you guessed it, 17 days. Didn’t the Major League Baseball Players Association agree to extra off days in the schedule to avoid this problem this past offseason? But I digress.

Of course, being in the middle of a playoff race with 61 games left in the season, every stretch is crucial for the Colorado Rockies, but this one seems to be just as significant … if not more than the last.

The breakdown of the next 17 games look like this: 10 homes games, seven road, three interleague games, no opponents under .500, opponents combined winning percentage .541 (as of Thursday, a combined 42 games over .500), and only four games within the National League West division.

It says a lot when the easiest portion of this stretch includes a four-game series at the currently .500 St. Louis Cardinals and a three-game set at Coors against the surging Pittsburgh Pirates, who are coming off a recent 11-game winning streak.

The 17 straight games finally concludes with an all-important four-game series against the West division-leading Dodgers.

The Rockies did have the luxury of the Thursday off day yesterday, allowing time to make the all-important rotation decision, which our Jake Shapiro wrote about, until after this weekend. This allows the Rockies to continue carrying an extra bat on the bench for a few more days and not be forced to make multiple roster moves with the finalization of the Seunghwan Oh trade.