Who was the last Colorado Rockies pitcher to get a hit, hit a homer?

On Thursday, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred had a press conference in which not much new information came out. However, one of the things that Manfred did reveal was that the owners and the MLBPA have “agreed” to have a designated hitter in the National League in 2022 and beyond, meaning that the days of Germán Márquez hitting better than some position players on the Colorado Rockies are, in theory, over.

So that made us think: Who are the Colorado Rockies pitchers that got the last hit and the last home run? You probably won’t guess the former but you probably will guess the latter.

Daniel Bard and Germán Márquez will be the answers to two Colorado Rockies trivia questions.

For the last Colorado Rockies pitcher to ever get a hit, the answer is relief pitcher Daniel Bard.

Bard got the hit in the very last game of the 2021 season against the Arizona Diamondbacks on October 3. The Rockies ended up losing by a score of 5-4 when D-Backs second baseman Josh VanMeter hit a walk-off homer off of Carlos Estévez to end the game.

Bard, who was the Rockies closer before Estévez, came on in relief early in the game. The Rockies were having a bullpen day so long reliever/spot starter Ashton Goudeau started and went three innings without allowing a run and allowing just one hit. Bard came on to relieve him in the 4th inning.

Bard ended up pitching two innings but his spot in the lineup was due to leadoff in the top of the 5th inning. On a 1-0 count, Bard lined a single into left field off of D-Backs left-handed starter Humberto Mejia.

It wasn’t a weak hit either, as Statcast had the exit velocity of the hit at 99.9 MPH.

The last home run hit by a Rockies pitcher is a bit easier to guess. Germán Márquez hit the last and the penultimate homers by a Rockies pitcher. Márquez hit the last one against San Diego Padres pitcher Yu Darvish in the 5th inning at Petco Park in San Diego.

Like Bard, it wasn’t a cheap one either as Márquez hit it to dead center field and hit it 417 feet with an exit velocity of 103.1 MPH. His penultimate homer came on July 11, 2018 at Coors Field in the 5th inning.

The Rockies were facing the D-Backs and were already up 18-1 so, even though it was the fifth inning, former Rockies infielder Daniel Descalso was pitching for the D-Backs. He and catcher Alex Avila pitched 4 2/3 of the eight innings pitched by the D-Backs that night. Márquez, who already had an RBI single earlier in the game, hit a 447 homer to left-center field with an exit velocity of 104.6 MPH.

However, the longest homer in the Statcast era by a pitcher, in general, was hit by former Rockies pitcher Jon Gray.

Maybe we’ll still get to see the ultra-rare pitcher hitting with the DH happen but other than that, it looks like the nearly 50 years that the AL and NL differentiated with that one rule has passed on.