Monday Morning Rockpile:

The problem we have with looking so intensely at our own little part of the forest is that we sometimes don't understand that the trees we're looking at aren't that much different from trees other people are looking at. So I'm going to bring up Rany on the Royals as a cautionary tale to not get too enamored with a single team's interleague results as a measure of quality.

The Royals are now 33-27 (.550) against the NL over the last four years. In that same timeframe, they’re 182-314 (.367) against AL opponents. Sixty games is a pretty substantial sample size, and in those 60 games the Royals have outscored their opponents by 46 runs, so their record is representative of how well they’ve played. How much would the perception of this franchise be altered if they simply had the good fortune to play in the inferior league?

The Rockies over that same time span have a 31-23 (.574) record against the "superior" league while going 230-272 (.458) against the NL. The Rockies laugh at the Royals measly positive 46 interleague run differential with their +55. The rest of his overall point (that the NL hasn't closed the talent gap this season) might be true, but looking at an individual team's performance to support that claim just doesn't work that well. At any rate, when the Rockies go to KC next week, I hope the outcome is more like our 2005 sweep of the Royals rather than last season's series.

So why do the Rockies look so good against the AL while the rest of their NL mates look like AAA fodder? I mean if the NL looks as bad as it has, imagine how much worse it would look without the Rockies pulling the numbers up these last last few years. It's certainly a mystery to me. I can see how having more AB's for Ryan Spilborghs helps, but it's harder for me to explain how Jorge De La Rosa suddenly turns into the pitcher he was Saturday, or otherwise how the rest of our pitchers cut their runs allowed in half when facing AL opponents.

Aaron Cook is making a strong push to be the franchise's first 20 game winner. Unfortunately, there's just a huge "what might have been" to read into the gap between him and our second best starter, who at this point is probably Ubaldo Jimenez. At any rate, today's a good day to stay positive with the win yesterday, our fourth straight series victory, Troy Tulowitzki and Clint Barmes closing in on returns to the lineup, and a chance to make the league's worst road record even uglier tonight.

While we're waiting for Tulo and Barmes, does Joe Koshansky get called up in the meantime? That would leave Omar Quintanilla as our only legit middle infielder this week, which would be a scarier proposition if it weren't for the decent job Ian Stewart and Jeff Baker have been doing while holding down second. Still, something to think about.