At 5:34 p.m. on Memorial Day, before many of us had fired up the grill or taken our first belly flop in the pool of the summer, it was already late in the 2019 baseball season for the Rockies.
This underperforming Colorado team, manager Bud Black acknowledged Monday, finds itself “in a spot where we hoped to be better. But we’re not.”
Yes, 110 games remain on the regular-season schedule. The Rockies, however, really needed this 4-3, extra-inning victory against Arizona, on a day when the Diamondbacks started veteran Zack Greinke, among the best pitchers in the game.
Although most of us are trying to figure out if last summer’s shorts still fit, the Rockies already find themselves in a tight spot, with a 25-27 record.
“We can’t afford to have too many lapses the next two-thirds of the season,” Black said.
I’m no brain surgeon. But you don’t have to be a Harvard graduate to know this a critical 10-game homestand for Colorado.
Well, not only have the Rockies opened this lengthy stint in with a 3-1 record, each of the victories has been earned in dramatic fashion, with the home team prevailing on its final at-bat.
Shortstop Trevor Story crushed a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to start the fun Friday night, while catcher Tony “Walk-Off” Wolters’ sacrifice fly Sunday beat Baltimore. This Memorial Day, it was ’s turn to be the hero.
Tapia, the 25-year-old outfielder from Dominican Republic, stepped in the batter’s box at 5:34 p.m. and coaxed a single through the infield in the bottom of the 11th inning for a clutch, game-winning hit.
As Tapia waited alongside an interpreter in the Colorado clubhouse for the media horde to descend on his locker, veteran teammate lightheartedly gave him all the English required to describe his heroics: “Itap good. We won. Good hit.”
Wherever the Rockies go from here, they will rise or fall in the National League standings on the basis of their youth. Half the position players in the Colorado’s starting lineup against the Diamondbacks were relative newbies being counted on heavily by a team that has qualified for the playoffs in two consecutive years.
In addition to Tapia, there’s hitting in the heart of the batting order, Brendan Rodgers learning the nuances of infield play at the major-league level and trying to prove he can produce results as sweet as his natural swing.
They are the Baby Bombers, and established stars such as and Story need their help right now to avoid 2019 being a lost year. OK, so nobody’s asking these Baby Bombers to be Cody Bellinger, the 23-year-old MVP candidate to the Dodgers. At times, Dahl, Tapia and Rodgers will test the patience of their manager and the home crowd alike. But either they will give this team a jolt, or the dog days of summer will arrive early in Colorado.
Even in the long grind of a season, Memorial Day is not too early to sneak a peek at the playoff race and begin to draw conclusions.
“I look at the standings every day,” Black quipped. “The standings always give you a pretty good read of where you are in the standings.”
The late, great Yogi Berra could not have said it better himself.
After an awful 3-12 start to the season, Colorado has crept back to within two games of the .500 mark after 52 games on the schedule. On this Memorial Day, there was more than the sizzle of brats on the grill. I swear the Rockies could almost smell a wild-card berth from here.
“This team has a lot of grit,” said , who scored the winning run after leading of the 11th inning with a double. “We’re grinding.”
In baseball, there can be no glory without the grind.
At this point, the stats machine operated by the analytical gurus at Fangraphs spits at Colorado’s shot of making the playoffs, with the Rockies given only an 8.3 percent chance of advancing to the postseason for a third year in a row.
To beat those odds, this team must maximize anything resembling a hot streak. Anything fewer than seven victories on this 10-game homestand will feel like an opportunity lost.
How’s this for a Yogism? In LoDo, it’s gotten late early.
Maybe that’s why as the Rockies celebrated around Tapia in the infield after this victory, they danced with the urgency of September.
