About three hours before the reeling Rockies were to play the Giants on Monday night, manager Jim Tracy closed his clubhouse and gathered his players for a team meeting.
When he emerged, he was singing his usual number, the Optimist Club Hymn.
“Last year’s National League batting champion right now is hitting .230, a Gold Glove (and) Silver Slugger award winner at shortstop right now is hitting .250, we’re looking for some production from third base, the ace of our staff hasn’t won a game and we’re 20-18,” he said.
“If you would have posed that question and said what would their record be and somebody said 20-18, you would have laughed at them. So I know in the midst of what it is we’re searching for, there’s an awful lot of good up to this point that’s taken place, none of which has taken place here recently, but there’s 124 more games to play.”
A few hours later, last year’s National League batting champion launched a sixth-inning blast so titanic it hung in the sky like a distant moon before disappearing over the center-field fence.
With a single swing, Carlos Gonzalez knocked two-time Cy Young Award winner Tim Lincecum from the game, gave the Rocks a lead they would not relinquish and blew out the black cloud hanging over Coors Field. Whether it was enough to get their mojo back is another question.
“We’re not playing the game with any confidence,” general manager Dan O’Dowd had said before the game. “There’s no swagger to our club at all right now.”
The Rocks’ bats seem to be coming back to life. They have scored 33 runs in their last five games, even if they have won only two of them. But for all the relief in Monday night’s win, the game also confirmed major weaknesses that can’t be ignored much longer.
The state of the bullpen is untenable. In relief of starter Clayton Mortensen, Tracy used every relief pitcher he believes in, five in all. Franklin Morales and Felipe Paulino have become dead weight in games the Rocks hope to win. The club might as well be carrying 10 pitchers instead of 12.
So today, as they attempt to sweep the two-game set and climb back into first place, every relief pitcher in whom Tracy has confidence will have pitched the previous day.
That pretty much rules out setup man Rafael Betancourt, who didn’t survive the eighth anyway. Betancourt, 36, has pitched on consecutive days twice in May and given up two runs in the second outing each time.
O’Dowd is in a tough spot. Morales and Paulino are out of options, so he can’t send them down to work out their issues. Both have live arms, so another team might take a shot, but O’Dowd can’t wait too long or he’ll burn out the rest of his bullpen.
The other perplexing weakness on display was an inability to execute Little League-level fundamental baseball.
Two players were asked to lay down simple sacrifice bunts. Dexter Fowler failed and Alfredo Amezaga failed. Fowler tried to bunt again later, this time not showing it early, and couldn’t get it down then either. He erased his failure to sacrifice in the fifth with a smash through third baseman Mark DeRosa, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Rockies’ leadoff man cannot lay down a bunt on a bet.
Fowler added two baserunning gaffes. Lincecum picked him off in the first when he broke too soon on a stolen base attempt. And catcher Jose Morales was forced to run into an out at the plate when Fowler chugged into third in the sixth without noticing Morales was still there.
Fowler was also caught in a rundown on a botched hit-and-run in the eighth, but it wasn’t clear whether he, batter Jonathan Herrera, third-base coach Rich Dauer or Tracy was responsible. In any case, the man who covers ground in the outfield like a gazelle is now 2-for-7 in stolen base attempts.
The box score will show Fowler reached base four times, scored twice and drove in a run. So maybe the Rocks can obliterate their failures to execute with big bats. But let’s be honest: A team that can’t play sound, fundamental baseball is as much a reflection on the manager and coaches as the players.
All’s well that ends well, of course, and if CarGo’s monster shot gets him going he could blot out a month’s worth of baseball sins. But from the bullpen to the basepaths, the Rocks still have issues.
Dave Krieger: 303-954-5297, dkrieger@denverpost.com or
