Do the baseball gods have a bone to pick with the ?
When the Rockies finally begin to look good, it seems everything has gone bad. The soul-shaking news that pitcher must put down the baseball to fight cancer has been followed by one bad break after another, whether itap to the hand of first baseman Ian Desmond or the arm of catcher .
“We’ve had a tough time with bones,” observed Rockies manager Bud Black, who isn’t a doctor but now dispenses more spoonfuls of sugar to help the medicine go down than nurse Greg Focker did in “Meet the Parents.” Or, as Focker once said: “They don’t call me Barry Poppins for nothing.”
Black was sitting Tuesday in his office at Salt River Fields, where he talks baseball every morning with the media. Of late, Black has talked more about the disabled list than the double switch. Add pitcher (oblique) and outfielder (rib) to the run of bad health luck, and the Rockies could open the season with 20 percent of what they expected to be their 25-man roster unable to play.
I recall chatting at the outset of spring training with outfielder about the team’s chances of making a serious playoff bid this year, and the first words out of his mouth were: “We have to stay healthy.”
Lost in the din of Broncomania was the fact the Rockies were very close to becoming a playoff contender on the final day of July 2016. With a 7-2 victory against the , Colorado won its fifth consecutive game, evened their record at 52-52 and stood four games out of a wild-card berth with two full months remaining on the regular-season calendar.
But all the team’s wildest dreams of a postseason appearance all but ended that day, when rookie shortstop , then leading the National League with 27 home runs, tore a ligament in his thumb while sliding into second base.
While the health issue confronted by Bettis is far bigger than any ballpark concern, the baseball injury that concerns me most is to Desmond, scheduled to undergo surgery Wednesday on his left hand and miss more than a month. His conversion to first base and relationship with a new mitt now must be delayed to the point where Desmond will be forced to really get to know a new position when the errors and games really count.
“You can’t hurry love. I think thatap a song,” Desmond told me last month. “Lust might be quick. But love takes time.”
But this is precisely why Black was hired: to manage the inevitable crises in every major-league season. His gray-at-the-temples experience and steady-as-it-goes disposition gives the Rockies a chance to keep the faith while Bettis battles cancer and the assorted ailments of Desmond, Dahl, Rusin and Murphy slowly heal.
In the past, maybe the Rockies had managers too intense (Clint Hurdle), too fatalistic (Jim Tracy) and too hands-off () to nurse the players through a patch so rough it could make everybody surrender and wait until next year.
I understand the temptation to give up on the bad-news Rockies before the regular-season even begins. My advice: Don’t do it. Yes, the job of making a playoff run has grown harder. But that will only make the comeback story of a long downtrodden franchise all the sweeter.
