Phoenix – It’s time for concern, time to wonder if the Rockies will ever make a U-turn. The Rockies couldn’t win a game Monday night when they held a lead, succumbing 6-5 to the Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field.
This loss, their ninth in their past 13 games, came 29 hours after they couldn’t gain a lead against the Kansas City Royals in 12 innings, dropping a series to the American League’s worst team.
“At a certain point you just go out and do the best you can and see what happens. As a player, sitting here trying to figure it out doesn’t help,” first baseman Todd Helton said after the Rockies fell to nine games under .500, a thud not reached last season until Aug. 24.
“I don’t know (if the hole is getting too deep). But we are going to have to do something. We can’t keep going on at this pace.”
The Rockies are stuck in an unenviable position. Their goal was to win the division this season, or, at the very least, contend for a playoff spot. The optimism was built around a maturing core of young players whom they thought would experience linear growth.
Instead, the Rockies have spent the past 33 days in last place in the National League West, stricken by a rash of injuries and underperforming players. Monday was the latest heart-in-a-blender experience. For the second time this season, Colorado tagged reigning NL Cy Young Award winner Brandon Webb for five runs – and lost.
Reliever Jorge Julio surrendered a game-tying home run to Carlos Quentin in the seventh inning. After cleaning up Julio’s mess, left-hander Jeremy Affeldt yielded a sacrifice fly in the eighth to Quentin, one of his career-high five RBIs, with manager Clint Hurdle reluctant to use right-handed rookie Darren Clarke in that situation.
“We have run into a hard time, a game like that is hard to lose,” said center fielder Willy Taveras, who expects to play tonight despite a sore tendon behind his left knee. “It’s been really tough for us. We have to keep working hard.”
Operating on a tight budget and no drastic roster changes planned, Hurdle continues to believe in his team because these players, namely Garrett Atkins, have experienced success.
Atkins is hitting .236 – he was snake-bit on two hard-hit balls Monday – after getting NL MVP votes last season. He’s part of a lineup that has accumulated more than 10 hits just once in the past two weeks.
“There’s not one person in there that’s happy with where we are right now, that doesn’t think we can’t do better or won’t do better,” Hurdle said. “But to remake everything after seven weeks would be a knee-jerk reaction.”
It was a whiplash reaction that haunted the Rockies. Julio was hitting 98 miles per hour on the radar gun. That was the good news. The bad news is that he had no confidence in his slider and his fastball wasn’t moving.
“It was not my day,” said Julio, forced into a critical inning because of the recent struggles and excess pitch counts of Ramon Ramirez and Manny Corpas. “I know everybody over there, so it’s tough to have this happen.”
Troy E. Renck can be reached at 303-954-1301 or trenck@denverpost.com.
