Rockies Mailbag: Can the bullpen be fixed? What is Dick Monfort’s plan?
In a fitting end to a historically bad first half, the Rockies lost to the worst team in baseball.
Colorado, the National League cellar-dweller, fell 5-3 to the American League chump White Sox in the series opener on Friday at Guaranteed Rate Field.
Brenton Doyle and Michael Toglia both homered, but that wasn’t enough as Chicago tagged Dakota Hudson for five earned runs in five innings. Four of those came when the wheels came off in the sixth, and the Rockies only mustered three hits.
Here’s a look at Colorado’s atrocious first 81 games, which has the Rockies (27-54) on pace for 108 losses that would top last season’s franchise-worst 103-loss debacle. Colorado’s .333 winning percentage is a new club record for the lowest first-half winning percentage, topping the 1993 and 2005 teams that were 28-53.
Playing With Infamy
Colorado Rockies starting pitcher Kyle Freeland, left, rubs up a new baseball after giving up a two-run home run to Arizona Diamondbacks’ Lourdes Gurriel Jr., right, during the first inning Thursday, March 28, 2024, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
The bad omens started on opening day, when the Rockies were ripped 16-1 in Arizona, the worst season-opening loss in club history.
In that defeat, the Diamondbacks scored 14 runs on 13 hits in a never-ending third inning that’s the most of both tallies in a single frame in franchise history.
The ugly loss helped ensure Colorado would never sniffed the .500 mark in the first half.
The Rockies trailed in each of their first 31 games to start the season, surpassing the 1910 St. Louis Browns’ streak of 28 for the longest such drought to begin a season in the Modern Era.
Even after that was snapped on May 3 in Pittsburgh, it took another week for the Rockies to finally win two games in a row. That came May 10, breaking the streak of 51 games without back-to-back victories going back to ’23, and 37 in ’24. Both stretches are franchise lows.
The next day, Colorado finally won its first series on its 13th try after a franchise-worst 12 series without a series victory to begin the year.
As the Rockies entered a full-blown June swoon, the going only got rougher, making a seven-game May winning streak feel like a distant memory.
Colorado is 6-19 this month, the worst mark in the National League, while allowing an MLB-high 168 runs.
This month, the Rockies blew two more games via catastrophic ninth innings — June 5 against the Reds and June 18 against the Dodgers — to set another dubious Modern Era record. Those meltdowns gave the Rockies six instances in which they were leading in the ninth or later only to give up five-plus runs that inning and surrender the lead, surpassing the four times that the ’39 Browns and ’52 White Sox did so.
Along the way of a look-away first half, the Rockies were dominated by a variety of starting pitchers — the Blue Jays’ Jose Berrios, Phillies’ Ranger Suarez, Mariners’ Luis Castillo, Padres’ …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – Sports
