Team Volatility is back. And just in time, too.
Two weeks ago, the Rockies were as bad as any team in baseball. They had just been swept by the Dodgers to fall to 18-28. Next stop: Oblivion. Clint Hurdle would be fired as manager before the next game.
Two weeks later, they have won nine straight to climb to 29-32, back among the living. If baseball measured volatility the way the stock market does, the Rocks would have the highest beta in the big leagues.
“Since I’ve been here, it seems like when we get rolling we run off a few in a row, and when we start getting cold we’ll lose a few games in a row,” shortstop Troy Tulowitzki said after Friday night’s come-from-behind 6-4 verdict over the Mariners. “Right now we’re playing well, so we just got to keep it going.”
The search for rational explanations goes to the usual places. The new manager, Jim Tracy, for example, under whom the Rocks are now 11-4.
So it’s worth pointing out that one of the key plays in Friday night’s win, Ubaldo Jimenez’s slug bunt to drive in Tulowitzki with the tying run in the sixth inning, was the former manager’s design.
At the beginning of spring training, Hurdle installed an automatic slug bunt against the wheel play. Over and over on the back fields of the Rockies’ complex in Tucson, he instructed his pitchers: “If you’re up there to bunt and you see the shortstop break for third, pull the bat back and swing it.”
With two on and one out in the sixth, all that practice finally paid off.
“I saw the shortstop breaking to third base,” Jimenez said. “They told us if you ever see the shortstop breaking, you have to pull the bat and swing. I think it was the first time I’ve ever seen the shortstop breaking. I just reacted.”
One batter later, Tracy reinforced the aggressive mind-set by calling for a squeeze bunt from Dexter Fowler. Ian Stewart barely beat the tag play at the plate with what turned out to be the winning run.
“Personally, I really feel like they’re playing baseball very much according to the plan that was mapped out in spring training,” Tracy said.
So why couldn’t they do that the first two months of the season?
“When you start analyzing the ages of some of these players, that might have something to do with it,” Tracy said.
This was an explanation Hurdle could no longer offer. The Rocks went through their not-ready-for-prime-time phase early in his tenure. As the first generation of homegrown talent matured, blaming mistakes on youth started to sound like an excuse.
But while the Rocks have veterans such as Todd Helton, Brad Hawpe and Clint Barmes in the lineup, they also have a new generation of kid Rocks, from Fowler to Stewart to Tulowitzki to Chris Iannetta.
“The biggest thing for me is the mood on the field has changed,” Tulowitzki said. “Early on in the season, we were expecting bad things to happen. Now we’re expecting good things to happen. We’re waiting for the big pitch, we’re waiting for the big hit, and we’re getting it. Whereas before, we were thinking out there, ‘What’s going to happen? What’s going to go wrong? How are we going to blow this lead?’ ”
And what, exactly, pushed them around that corner?
Tulo shrugged. “We’ve been successful in some key situations as of late,” he said.
That simple. And that inscrutable. Things go well a time or two, confidence takes root and a team in the tank suddenly has a swagger we haven’t seen since . . . well . . . you know.
Early on, Tulowitzki seemed to be swinging at every fastball in his eyes. Friday he swung at another one and belted it out of the park.
“I’m an aggressive hitter and I’m going to swing at some pitches up in the zone,” he explained. “I’m going to swing and miss sometimes, and I know that, but sometimes it’s going to pay off, too, and I’m going to do some damage.
“When I’m going bad, people can say, ‘Aw, he’s chasing the high pitch,’ but when things are going good, it doesn’t seem like people say, ‘Oh, he’s hitting the high pitch.’ ”
Why would they? It’s so confusing. Everything that was bad is now good. Just like that. Even Team Volatility can’t exactly explain it.
Call it youth. Call it patience. Call it the new manager. Call it baseball.
Oh, and call it about time.
Dave Krieger: 303-954-5297 or dkrieger@denverpost.com
