Balderdash

The Rockies were fortunate to take the final game of the Florida trip 1-0 despite the bats being buried in the frozen tundra.  I only have one word which is the headliner for this post.  They also lost the home opener 10-6.  There were a lot of comments by the tv crew and players themselves that the bats have finally heated up in the final three innings.  Personally, I do not count garbage time scoring in assessing whether Colorado has snapped out of the deep slump.

As the RWOers have noted, the off season did not accomplish much except to give extensions to Nolan Arenado and German Marquez.  The brass decided to extend the core players with the money rather than recycle worn tires and let their core players walk.  As a result, we decided to go with the Garrett Hampson, Raimel Tapia, Ryan McMahon among other youngsters to give us a good season.  So far, nothing from the youngsters which is a major contributor to the deep slump.

As the Avs hockey analysts like to say, we need secondary scoring to support the core players.  We are getting none of the secondary scoring which is flustering the Rockies.  Also, as sdcarp says, having a new hitting coach is not that significant.  He is right unless we did what the Dodgers did – they hired a new hitting coach out of nowhere.  Here’s a partial excerpt from “The Athletic” article:

“Historically, major-league teams have hired former big-league veterans for hitting coach gigs. Van Scoyoc has no such pedigree. Not even close. A middling player who made it as far as tiny Cuesta College in California’s central coast, Van Scoyoc cut his teeth as a part-time high-school assistant coach. He then nabbed the hitting coach job at noted baseball hotbed San Diego Christian College. But Van Scoyoc’s skill in the role outweighed his resume. As an early adopter or the uppercut/launch angle craze, Van Scoyoc tutored multiple successful big leaguers, most notably helping J.D. Martinez develop into a terror at the plate.”

To make matters worse, the Rockies decided to go with Tyler Anderson as the #3 starting pitcher.  All he has done is having his team go 3-16  when he started over the last 19 games dating back to last year.  Colorado cannot continue to let him make more starts which is essentially a guaranteed loss.  We  have Peter Lambert, Jeff Hoffman, and Antonio Senzatella (still rehabbing) just a phone call away.  In addition there’s Dallas Kuechel still looking for a job.

We are in for a long season unless we replace Tyler Anderson and the youngsters start playing like they did in the minor leagues.  Tonight Gray Wolf goes against Walker Buehler who has always shut down the Rockies in his career.  He’s the new Clayton Kershaw.

If you notice, we had RWO refreshed thanks to jaredean to remove useless categories and speed up the page uploading.  Yay!