PHOENIX — Opening day doesn’t always foreshadow the baseball season to come, but the Rockies’ 17-run, 22-hit opener will do as a symbol of the challenges ahead until a better one comes along.
In other words, get used to it. As long as your DeLorean is in the shop, these might be as close as we get to the good old days of Rockies baseball.
The oddity was that the slugfest should come in a matchup between Aaron Cook and Arizona’s Brandon Webb. If you’re planning to attend a game with less accomplished pitchers, you might want to pack an overnight bag.
“Not a normal day for me, or (Webb) either,” said Cook, who will carry a 23.14 ERA into his second start.
“Cookie’s going to be all right,” manager Clint Hurdle said. “He’s going to be a good pitcher. Today we didn’t get it done off the mound.”
Assuming the Rocks will be challenged from the mound quite often, the issue is just how good they’ll be at keeping up. With potent hitters up and down the lineup, they should score plenty. But they won’t do it exactly the way the old bombers did.
Three of spring training’s offensive themes were on display in the opener — trust, productive outs and aggressive baserunning. The results were mixed.
The first chance at a productive out came in the third inning, when left fielder Seth Smith came up with runners on second and third and one out. You’ll recall the Rocks mostly tried to hit three-run homers in these situations last year, usually leaving the runners where they were. Smith waited for a pitch he could pull. His groundball to second drove in the Rocks’ first run and moved Ryan Spilborghs from second to third.
For an offense that struggled with runners in scoring position last year, eight runs on 10 hits and only four men left on was an encouraging start.
The trust showed up in the same inning. Todd Helton, with a lifetime batting average of .271 versus Webb, stepped in with Spilborghs on third and two out. On deck was Garrett Atkins, who carried a .162 average against the Arizona ace.
When Webb offered a walk, Helton took it, leaving it to Atkins, who worked his own base on balls, leaving it to Brad Hawpe, who confirmed his .340 lifetime average against Webb with a bases-clearing double.
The aggressive baserunning piece didn’t work out quite as well. Smith stole a base in the first, but unlikely base-stealers Hawpe and Chris Iannetta were thrown out in the second and sixth, respectively, when hitters failed to protect them.
With a man on and nobody out in the second, Ian Stewart took a 3-2 inside pitch, thinking he had a walk. Home plate umpire Gary Cederstrom called it a strike. Running on the pitch, Hawpe was a dead duck, short- circuiting a promising inning.
“It’s probably a pitch I shouldn’t be taking 3-2 but I thought it was a ball,” Stewart said. “That’s why I took it, obviously.”
“Wasn’t a strike,” hitting coach Don Baylor said. “I came inside and looked at it. Can’t hit that pitch.”
In the sixth, Hurdle sent Iannetta on a 1-1 pitch to Spil- borghs, who tried to protect his catcher but barely made contact with a pitch out of the zone. Diamondbacks catcher Chris Snyder caught the ticked ball and threw Iannetta out.
This is often the price you pay for the element of surprise. A 1-1 count does not put much pressure on a pitcher to throw a strike, and Webb didn’t. That’s why the hit-and-run is traditionally called in more favorable hitter’s counts.
“We’re going to continue to hit-and-run, we’re going to run 3-2, we’re going to try stealing some bases,” Hurdle said. “We came up short on a 3-2 run today when Stewart got called out. The hit-and-run, we had a ticked ball, we weren’t able to put it in play, but we’re still going to be moving on the bases. We need to.”
It might seem perverse to critique the offense on a day it put up eight runs, but these failures show that even on a productive day, there was an opportunity to do more.
Offensively, the Rocks look loaded. Given their pitching, they’d better be. The back end of the rotation is likely to provide a lot of three-hour, or longer, games this year. As in the old days, the Rocks will need every run they can get.
Dave Krieger: 303-954-5297 or dkrieger@denverpost.com
