OK. Enough already. Don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of eating the stale baloney the Rockies are selling.
The Rockies keep telling us they are a better baseball team than at any time in this franchise’s recent, inglorious past.
And, every day, those happy words sound more like a lie.
You can draw a smiley face on a donkey’s behind, and it will still look like …
After Colorado got trounced 11-3 by the horrendous Tampa Bay Rays on Wednesday, I walked up to outfielder Carlos Gonzalez in the Rockies clubhouse. He sat at his locker, elbows on his knees, the picture of dejection. But, as always, CarGo was willing to talk, take responsibility and try to make sense of another baseball season going wrong in LoDo.
I asked Gonzalez: How are you doing?
“How are you doing? Probably better than me right now,” Gonzalez replied.
CarGo refuses to give up, but he knows as well as I do: With a record of 43-51, Colorado has exactly two more victories than it did at the same point a year ago. If thatap progress, then the Rockies are going nowhere fast.
“I feel like we’re definitely a better team than we were last year. And I’m not talking about the record. I’m talking about the players we have here in the clubhouse,” said Gonzalez, as perplexed as anybody as to why the Rockies haven’t won more games.
That’s precisely the problem: There’s a huge gap between the baseball team the Rockies see in the mirror and the baseball team the Rockies put on the field.
Tampa Bay arrived in town, looking lost, like a bunch of guys who couldn’t find Casa Bonita if Siri gave them perfect directions while holding their hands. The Rays were in a slump on the road like you used to read about in the Bible, going 40 days and 40 nights without a victory outside of Florida.
But the Rays somehow won this three-game series by beating the Rockies two consecutive times, by a combined score of 21-4.
The good people of Colorado might be the most forgiving baseball fans on earth. But as the clouds gathered on a summer afternoon, the mood of 31,456 in attendance darkened, and there were a smattering of boos as the Rays circled the bases, torching Rockies starting pitcher Jorge De La Rosa for nine runs (seven earned) in four innings.
Oh, well. At least the crowd can tell their neighbors the exact moment when all hope in this Colorado baseball season died: It was the bottom of the fifth inning, two Rockies on base, with Gonzalez at the plate. He swung and missed at a pitch out of the zone for strike three. CarGo turned toward the home dugout, flipped his bat with frustration, then punctuated his disgust by slamming his batting helmet into the ground.
“We’re better than we’re playing right now,” said Gonzalez. He wants to believe a wild-card berth remains a possibility, but also acknowledged the Rockies would have to go on a two-week tear to even get back in the hunt. The trade deadline looms: Who’s a candidate to get dealt? Gonzalez? De La Rosa? First baseman Mark Reynolds? Catcher Nick Hundley? The possibilities seem endless.
CarGo recently appeared in the All-Star Game. Nolan Arenado is the best third basemen in the game. Rookie pitchers Jon Gray and Tyler Anderson seem to have the right stuff to win at the major-league level. If there really is a gap between the talent on the roster and results in the standings, then the blame will fall on manager Walt Weiss, fair or not.
Weiss clearly was ticked after dropping a three-game series to the Rays. But when I asked his level of frustration, the manager bit the bullet so hard you could practically hear his teeth grinding.
“Itap always frustrating when we lose a series, especially at home,” Weiss said. “But we’ll focus on whatap ahead of us.”
More don’t worry, be happy. Every time the Rockies try to paint a smiley face on this season, they seem to end up looking like clowns.
As Colorado lost for the 24th time in 45 games at home and the fans that stayed to the bitter end of Cristhian Adames ninth-inning strikeout filtered out of the ballpark, what was the song that played over the public-address system? “Keep Your Head Up,” by Andy Grammer, which delivered this sugary message in the lyrics: “Only rainbows after rain, the sun will always come again…”
With the way this Rockies season is headed, maybe a more appropriate farewell song would have been “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC.
