Colorado Rockies: Bill Schmidt, Bud Black on upcoming trade deadline, playoff chances

As for what the additions could be, Bill Schmidt said “you always need pitching” but they “need some more offense too.” ‘We’re not a perfect club,” Schmidt said. “I said that in Spring Training but first and foremost would be on the mound.”

But they could look to sell some pieces too.

“We’ve got guys that will be free agents,” Schmidt said. “There’s been (some teams) that have expressed some interest in some of our guys so we’ll see what happens. We’re still going to try to win as many games as possible, though.”

Manager Bud Black thinks that they need to improve across the board but there is a big key to the team’s success.

"“The goal is to improve in all areas but if we pitch at a high rate, that gives us a better chance at chipping away at being 10 games under .500,” Black told Rox Pile on Monday. “And that means, like, everybody pitches has to pitch well. Everybody. 13 guys. We can’t have a slip-up of one guy. We saw that last night. We saw that a couple nights ago. To win games, we need a good start and a good bullpen to finish it off. It’s hard to bounce back and win games late, statistically. “Offensively, we have to apply enough pressure every night that we don’t make it easy on the opposition either, and not make it hard on our pitching so that’s got to be there too. Teams that win consistently combine good pitching with enough offense consistently and good defense. I’m alright with the overall team defense the last six weeks (or so), which is a good thing. I’d like to think that we can chip away at this 10 games under .500 deficit that we’re in. We were hoping that these first three games would go a little differently. They haven’t … There’s a week left here in July, there’s two months of baseball and a little bit in October. We’ve got to play really well. There’s no doubt about that. There’s a lot of teams ahead of us. We’re (7.5) games back from the last playoff spot so we have to pass a number of teams. We need to do that by winning series, putting together four or five-game winning streaks, combine that with another four or five (game winning streak), win 15 out of 20, win 22 out of 30, those types of runs. But it starts with pitching.”"