KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Rockies began interleague play Friday night the same way they left intraleague play. They didn’t hit enough to win.
Oh, sure, they allowed two runs via a wild pitch and a passed ball, and broke an unwritten rule by being thrown out at third base with no outs. But in the end, after they had been beaten 9-2 by the Kansas City Royals, those were footnotes buried in the fine print.
The screaming headline, once again, was that the Rockies didn’t hit. This time, they were one-man ganged by Jose Guillen, who hit two home runs off Jason Hammel, the first a two-run shot off a hanging slider in the fourth inning to break up a scoreless game.
“The way things went for us offensively, they more than likely weren’t going to need much more than that,” Rockies manager Jim Tracy said.
Sure enough. The Rockies had three hits in the second, but didn’t score when Troy Tulowitzki was gunned down by David DeJesus while trying to go from first to third on Brad Hawpe’s line single to right. They didn’t get another hit until the eighth, when Clint Barmes’ two-run homer accounted for their only runs.
Five straight innings without a hit or a sniff. Nothing out of the ordinary there, not the way the Rockies are going.
They went into the game hitting .197 in the first four games of their seven-game road trip. They came out of it at .205, but four of their eight hits came after they were down 6-0.
“I can’t explain it,” Barmes said. “I never would have guessed it would have gone on as long as it has. I’m sure there are a lot of things you can probably think of and find as an excuse to say, but I can’t answer that. . . . As a whole, we haven’t been getting the job done.”
Tracy has spent much of the season going against his nature by tweaking the lineup in search of a spark. This time, he inserted designated hitter Jason Giambi in the two hole, a spot he had occupied for only 260 at-bats in his career, to no avail.
“We obviously are completely aware what’s necessary to put our entire game together, and that’s consistency in our offense,” Tracy said. “And until it starts to show up, we have to keep grinding away and hopefully get to the point where it’s going to show up sooner rather than later.”
The Rockies went into the game with a 39-24 interleague record since the start of the 2006 season, making them the only National League team with a winning record in that span. But they picked a bad time to cross paths with the Royals, who have discovered a pulse under new manager Ned Yost, who replaced the fired Trey Hillman eight games ago.
The Royals in those eight games are 6-2 and have scored three-plus runs in nine innings. That’s the stuff of fantasy for the Rockies, who ensured themselves of a losing record on each of their four road trips.
“It comes and goes,” Hammel said. “Sometimes it’s tough to come by a run. . . . It’s tough to go through, but it’s ups and downs, it’s baseball. We’ll get out of it.”
Jimmy Armstrong: 303-954-1269 or jmarmstrong@denverpost.com
