Saturday, September 3, 2011

Rock Solid Recap: Our home away from home

Petco Park. If only we could play all of our road games at that wonderful stadium. Actually, it probably wouldn't make any difference unless we got to play those wonderfully miserable Padres every time, so I guess throw my dreams out the window.

Rockies 3, Padres 0 (boxscore)

Some good things to take away from this game.

Also some bad things, ugly things and hilarious things. But mostly good things.

Good: Kevin Millwood continued his surprising string of effectiveness, and less surprising string of professionalism, with seven scoreless innings. At this point, it's obvious the Rockies could do far worse for a 5th starter next season. But let's hope better options surface just to be safe.

Good: Jonathan Herrera with three hits out of the two-hole. It's great to see him taking advantage of his latest playing time. Not because it'll necessarily lead to even more playing time. Who the hell knows with Jim Tracy? It's just great to see it. That's all.

Bad: Helton-Smith-Kouzmanoff: 0-for-11 with one walk. Unfortunately, the one who drew the walk is the most likely to be benched come Saturday.

Hilarious: Umm... Tulo?

Good: Dexter Fowler officially tied his own Rockies record of 14 triples in a single season.

Ugly: He also unofficially broke his own Rockies record with 97 baserunning errors in a single season. Working on confirmation for that one.

Good: Rex Brothers and Rafael Betancourt owned the 8th and 9th innings once again. Quite a 1-2 late inning punch they've become.

Bad: We had another near collision in the outfield with Fowler and Carlos Gonzalez. One has to wonder why it's so difficult for these guys to communicate.

Good: Troy Tulowitzki raised his RBI total to 96 with a pair in the win. It's not always easy to look past some of those atrocious late inning at-bats, but the numbers he's put up early in games should be helping this team more than they have. They just don't because he's getting little assistance other than CarGo.

Final thought

It's start #3 for Alex White on Saturday night. No doubt a good performance would do wonders for his confidence, but would also go a long way towards calming down any irrational fans already concerned about his Rockies future. Yes, those folks do exist.

We'll be here to break White's outing down again early Sunday morning.

0 comments: