The in crowd in baseball likes to talk about hitting being contagious.
If so, the Rockies should be quarantined after their just-completed, 10-game homestand leading into the all-star break. Count them, 126 total hits in the 10 games. The only game in which the Rockies didn’t slam at least 10 hits was Sunday’s, when they had nine.
“Hitting was the big point in my mind in the success of our homestand,” manager Jim Tracy said. “Winning eight of 10 against three really good baseball teams, you’re not going to walk away feeling bad about 8-2 when you’ve had the Giants, the Cardinals and the first-place Padres.”
When the Rockies opened the homestand July 1 against the Giants, they were hitting .259 as a team. When the “second half” of the season begins Friday at Cincinnati, the team average will stand 10 points higher at .269.
The hitting surge was highlighted by the nine-run ninth inning that beat the Cardinals 12-9 on Tuesday night. The Rockies had 19 hits in that game, and then 15 the next night in an 8-7 win over St. Louis.
“This was a very good homestand for us,” third baseman Ian Stewart said. “Everybody should be happy where we are.”
The bats came alive up and down the lineup. Jonathan Herrera finished with an 11-game hitting streak out of the second spot in the lineup. Carlos Gonzalez had an eight-game streak out of the third spot, Dexter Fowler hit safely in seven straight from the leadoff spot and Clint Barmes posted a six-game streak from the bottom part of the order. Chris Iannetta hit homers in back-to-back games, and Melvin Mora cashed in his first homer of the season.
“We started swinging the bats better in this homestand, and it showed in the way we played,” Barmes said. “It was a lot of fun. When you string hits together, a lot of good things happen. But it can go the other way as well.”
Iannetta looked at his 87 at-bats as the key.
“For me, it takes a decent number of at-bats to get going,” Iannetta said. “We seem to be all coming out at the same time. To have everyone hot at the same time in a long season is tough to do.”
Herrera agreed that hitting is contagious.
“When one player starts to go good, everybody goes good,” the Rockies second baseman said.
Irv Moss: 303-954-1296 or imoss@denverpost.com
