PHOENIX — The road has rarely been kind to the Rockies.
An offense that roars at Coors Field often gets shushed in opposing ballparks. This season has been an extreme example of that.
Thursday night at Chase Field, the Rockies’ offense showed life, but their bullpen blew up late in an 8-6 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks. The D-backs’ three-game sweep gave them an 8-2 record against Colorado in the desert.
Though Colorado cranked out 12 hits Thursday, it entered the game with a team road batting average of .226, worst in the majors and tied with the 2010 team for the worst in franchise history. In stark contrast, the Rockies batted .302 at home this season, easily the best in baseball. Colorado’s road on-base percentage of .276 is the lowest in the majors and the worst in team history.
All-star third baseman Nolan Arenado, tied with Washington’s Bryce Harper for the National League lead with 41 homers, knows that the Rockies must get better at making adjustments when they leave home.
“There is no excuse for how we’ve played on the road, but it’s the reality,” said Arenado, who has proved the exception rather than the rule by hitting 21 of his 41 homers on the road.
After winning a franchise-low 21 road games in 2014, the Rockies swept three games from the Brewers in Milwaukee to open this season, then opened their next road trip by sweeping three games in San Francisco. For the first time in their history, the Rockies opened 6-0 away from home.
Since then, they having gone 24-48 — still better than last year, but nothing to shout about.
Arenado, hitting .316 at home vs. .255 on the road, said he’s not making excuses, but he has an explanation why the Rockies struggle.
“The truth is, the first few days away from home it’s hard to adjust to hard breaking stuff. It’s hard to recognize,” he said. “When we are headed on the road, after a few days, we should be able to adjust, but we still haven’t been taking enough good at-bats.”
Arenado said the Rockies’ youth is part of the problem.
“We have a lot of young guys, and it takes experience to learn to take quality at-bats,” he said.
The 2009 Rockies, who made the playoffs as a wild-card team, finished the season with a 41-40 record away from home, still the only time Colorado has posted a winning road record. Yes, that team blasted 92 homers on the road — second all time to the 1997 squad’s 115 — but the Rockies’ average was a middling .235.
Manager Walt Weiss believes the 2009 team’s road success was also about a quality pitching staff.
“That absolutely was part of it,” Weiss said. “That ’09 team stands out as the best pitching staff we have had. You have to win those low-scoring games, and history has shown that, for the most part, those games on the road are going to be low scoring. We haven’t shown that we are going to go on the road and score six or seven runs every night.”
Asked what the Rockies need to do better on the road in the future, Weiss paused and answered: “It’s a question that we have been asking for 20-some years now. I think it comes down to having a solid approach wherever we are at.”
Arenado would like to see more discipline from himself and his teammates. “Before he got traded, Tulo (Troy Tulowitzki) helped us because Tulo had quality at-bats,” Arenado said. “He slowed the games down, for everyone else. Now that’s he’s gone, guys are going up there and taking their hacks and swinging and missing a lot.
“There comes a certain time and place where we have to execute the bunt or whatever and move the runner over. I feel like we don’t do a very good job of that.”
Patrick Saunders: psaunders@denverpost.com or @psaundersdp
