Rockies fall to Jurrjens and Braves, 4-3
by Rox Girl on Jul 11, 2009 10:16 PM MDT
in Rockies Game Wraps
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PrintWhatever just happened, it needs to stop happening. At some point the Rockies as a team of hitters need to start feasting on strong starting pitching as well as weak if they hope to make it to, or especially through the playoffs.
For six innings, Braves starter Jair Jurrjens controlled this game outside of one glimmer of hope when Dexter Fowler tripled in the third.
Even then, the end result, as has been the case the past two games was just not enough to get the score across. If the Rockies aren't careful, those three words will come back to bite them in their quest for a playoff spot as well.
The Rockies can only come away with a split of this series now, and they can only do this with a wreck salvaging win tomorrow.
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thanks for covering the wrap for me
Though in light of your misspellinh of jair’s last name to resemble a lotion brand, I am compelled to say “it gets timely guys and does what it’s told”
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
by Andrew T. Fisher on Jul 11, 2009 10:25 PM MDT via mobile reply actions
predictive texting and posting equal fail
Timely hits**
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
by Andrew T. Fisher on Jul 11, 2009 10:27 PM MDT via mobile up reply actions
I am NOT a happy Rowbot right now
What the heck is going on with this team right now? This entire home stand has been one big “WTF” for me. We let the D-backs take 2 of 3, sweep the Nats in a way that was far more nerve racking than it should have been, and then we allow an average team to threaten a series loss??? Color me not getting it.
Fielding blunders, our starting pitchers have had nothing, serious non-success with RISP, and I could rant on, but won’t. I am more than a little worried at this moment. Maybe the break will do the team some good, but if we’re going to be legitimate playoff contenders, the Rox are going to have to make the most of the second half schedule. With the way this home stand has gone, I’m not sure about that. But I’d love to be proven wrong.
Free Seth Smith, damnit!
All Star Break couldn't get here fast enough
Seems like we have been playing down to our competition lately and it has been biting us in the ass. Hopefully the break lets us all get our heads striaght, but a win tomorrow would be nice.
Breath in. Count to ten. Exhale.
Okay, we’ve lost two in a row and have been playing pretty average-ish baseball as of late. Understandably a let down when we’re coming off a stretch where we wouldn’t lose a single game in a two week period. Tough adjustment for the best of fans. But remember this is baseball and every baseball team plays at least 162 games a year. This is why we can play as poorly as we did to start the season and still even think about being a contender today. It’s also why I dare say we’ll lose three games or more in a row sometime between now and the end of the season and that still doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be in trouble. We need to work through this of course, but it is certainly not a time to panic. I think the bats will be fine. The bridge between the starting pitching and Street is still the only subpar element I see in this team.
I'm disappointed, too,
but give some credit to the Braves. Jurrjens was d*mn good through 6 innings, and their bullpen has impressed me. Hopefully Hammel can salvage a split today, and the team can regroup after the break.
Sure, credit..,
That’s my main point however, at some point credit to the opposition becomes another excuse for why a team isn’t competitive. Good teams still are able to beat good pitching at least half the time. The Rockies haven’t really shown this ability so far this season.
What counts as good pitching?
Since the streak started, the Rockies have won games started by:
Wandy Rodriguez, Adam Wainwright, Joel Pineiro (maybe it’s a fluke, but he’s having a good year), Yovani Gallardo, Jarrod Washburn (another guy having a good year), Matt Garza, Dallas Braden, Chad Billingsley, Max Scherzer, and Tommy Hanson.
I don’t know how the record would come out if you totaled it all up, but they’ve been beating some good pitchers.
Leave Dexter alone! You're lucky he even performs for you!
Hanson's not a good pitcher
according to the braves who optioned him back down for some unknown reason (stupid move in my opinion because he’s not doing bad).
"We made too many wrong mistakes." ~Yogi Berra
"The ballplayer who loses his head, who can't keep his cool, is worse than no ballplayer at all." ~Lou Gehrig
JFK
I doubt that has anything to do with it
Evidently, the Braves needed an extra reliever for the weekend with Medlen starting today (and Vazquez not going on the DL.) Hanson just made the most sense to option out since he has options remaining, and he’ll be eligible to be brought back up in time for his next scheduled start.
A couple of things..,
1. I have troubles with your list. Besides Billingsley, Gallardo and Garza, the rest are inconsistent enough to be on a fringe of what would qualify. They’re decent sure, but if we’re talking about playoff caliber rotations, they wouldn’t inspire the most confidence. Scherzer and Hanson have a bit of a caveat with that as they will be very good, but as rookies inconsistency should be expected.
2. I have troubles with your arbitrary start point of the start of the streak. Though some of the load has shifted, this is largely the same personnel we’ve had all season with the Rockies and if you look at the season as a whole, beating top caliber starters just hasn’t happened as often as it should for a lineup that’s supposed to be as good as the Rockies is.
3. When we do beat good pitching, it usually seems to be because we get better pitching, not because our offense has broken out and given a good pitcher a bad day. Again, this lineup is talented enough that this should be happening more than we’ve seen it. I think we cycle back to a point where the team is doing this again at some point, but it’s frustrating to see it turn off so quickly like that.
I’ve got to finish the Rockpile, but I might come back and post more on this.
That's fine
It wasn’t meant to be a study, just a quick run through the games. I started with the streak partly due to laziness (didn’t want to do the entire season), and partly due to a lack of desire to revisit the ugliness that was the pre-streak season. Those early games obviously count. And yes, definitely at least some of those victories were largely due to superlative pitching—Marquis over Billingsley is a good example. I figured a win is a win, and since the Rockies have strengths in both offense and run prevention, I figure a win by either was ok.
If you’re going to cut out the “inconsistent” guys, though, then I wonder if the .500 thing holds, as the standard for “strong” pitching starts to look like pitchers who are be above average for multiple years. Jarrod Washburn is definitely inconsistent year to year, but this year he’s allowed fewer runs than any Rockies starter (and by a fair margin), but the Rockies beat him.
Looking at #3 would be interesting to see. Generally after a loss like this I would tend to “give some credit to the Braves,” as J. Henry Waugh, prop. mentioned, but the loss could also be chalked up to what must be a bit of a batting slump. But maybe it’s been a pattern against good pitching.
Leave Dexter alone! You're lucky he even performs for you!
I think in the end it shows us to be a mid-tier team:
Bottom-tier commentary: “We’re making this guy look like Cy Young.”
Middle-tier commentary: “We’re just getting outpitched. Give that guy some credit.”
Top-tier commentary: “We won.”
I think the Marquis vs. Billingsley game is a good example of what we’d be looking for, but a rare one of late. The other two games in that Dodgers series saw us and our offense on the short end of the stick. Same thing against Haren and now Lowe and Jurrjens.
We need an empirical standard of “good pitchers”.
If you look at the Rockies for 2009, the stretch from Wandy Rodriguez through St. Louis and the Milwaukee series with Gallardo is the high water mark for the team’s offense, but it lasted just over a week. After that, our pitching really took center stage for the next month. Now the pitching’s going back to being pretty good, but not as spectacular and the record is suffering because the offense isn’t there yet to pick them back up.
There have been some other good blips. May 6th against RJ and the Giants, for instance, but on the whole it’s not so great. Johnson did well the other time he faced us. The other Johnson, Josh from Florida, reined us in as well. Jurrjens now is two for two against us. Dan Haren has held us in check every time, we just got a better performance from Jimenez when we beat him once. Oswalt shut us down. Ted Lilly did likewise. Against starters named to the NL- All Star team, the Rockies have a 3-6 record. These are the types of pitchers we’d be facing in the playoffs, this seems to indicate to me that we’re not going to get very far if we do make it.
mid-tier makes sense, I think
You had the early stretch, where the team played decently in terms of runs score/allowed but lost all the close ones. Then they got hot and beat all sort of teams and pitchers. Then there’s this homestand, where the bats have gone fairly cold.
It’s been a weird year, and it’s still a little hard to tell what the real team is. Incidentally, they’re on a 86-87 win pace. Isn’t that close to what most projections had? I remember some being worse, but I don’t remember any being better. Seems odd, as the starters must be doing much better than projected. I wonder if the bullpen has brought them down, or if it’s the offense, too.
Leave Dexter alone! You're lucky he even performs for you!
The trouble with this
You’re narrowing the definition of a “good” pitcher too far, such that you’re really only talking about elite pitchers. Pitchers of the type you’re talking about rarely have bad days. Do the Astros have a better offense than the Rockies because they were able to score six runs off Gallardo? Or the Reds, who were able to get seven? Those were Gallardo’s two worst starts this season. Gallardo has had only five starts this season in which he’s given up more than two runs, or just one more than the number of times he’s given up zero. Against pitchers like that, you try to scratch across two or three runs and hope that it’s enough to win, unless you just happen to catch the guy on one of those rare days when he’s off his game.
And, Tim Lincecum’s worst start of the season came against the Padres. That’s about how random a really good pitcher’s off day can be.
Okay, but where do you draw a line? What standard would you have?
You seem to be going into the same anecdotal route rather than having a real standard and that’s my real big issue with it.
As to your other point, because the Padres had one good game against one great pitcher doesn’t make them a great team. Don’t pretend like I’m not aware of this. If they had several good games against great pitchers, though, you probably wouldn’t be using the italics like that because they would no longer be the Padres and instead some contention level threat. I’m not looking for a world beating performance every time out, but I do believe that good offenses are capable of beating good or even elite pitchers more than bad offenses are. The Rays, for instance, seem to have considerable more success scoring six or more when playing against the elite pitchers they face. I just don’t think settling for “We got outpitched,” is something for the team to aspire to.
Standard is a tough one
Though I agree if one were going to sit down and take a long look, the line needs to be drawn somewhere. I think then you could take anecdotal looks to poke behind the records.
The prob with all stars is that they’re a bit of a self-selective group wins-wise. None of the 4 NL playoff leaders have winning records against the al and nl all-star pitchers (though I could be off by a win or two, I did it quickly):
Dodgers 3-6
Giants 3-5
Cards 5-7
Phils 3-5
(The Dodgers’ record surprised me, but they’ve lost twice each to Marquis and Lincecum, and once to Cain and Felix Hernandez.)
My first guess at a standard would use season ERA+, or projected season ERA+ , draw the line at something well north of 100. It would probably help to look at several years worth of playoff teams to see how strong the starters actually were. Then do a multi year study of it, not that any of us have the time for it.
Leave Dexter alone! You're lucky he even performs for you!
Most of the games we've been losing lately
have been because of our struggling offense. We’ve lost 6 games since the Anaheim series where our opponents scored 4 runs or less. We’re giving those games away, and we’re wasting lots of excellent pitching. The Gonzalez experiment is hopefully over, Seth Smith needs to be starting every day, and probably hitting 2nd, 5th, or 6th as long as he’s hitting the way he has been. Carlos can get at-bats as a defensive replacement when we’ve got leads. Seems to me that replacing a .200 hitter with a .300 hitter could be a jolt in the arm.
And please, could someone tell Jim Tracy that when you’re behind in the 9th inning you don’t sacrifice bunt? He’s done this twice in the past 2 weeks, it makes me want to pull my hair out. In my 16 years as a Rockes/baseball fan, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anyone do that before. Especially at Coors – what is the point of having a hitters’ park if you’re hinging your comeback plans on sac bunts? At Coors Field, 1st base is scoring position half the time.
Like you said, I don't see this as a pitching problem so much so as a collective hitting slump...
I had zero confidence in Barmes to do anything with RISP last night, same unfortunately as Brad Hawpe (who is quietly slumping pretty hard).
We need to score runs to win games…let’s do that please.
Eschew Obfuscation!
Bunts in the 9th at home down 1
Isn’t he bunting because the offense is struggling? It does seem odd otherwise, as I don’t it’s not the “Book” move. (Play for a tie at home, win on the road…)
Leave Dexter alone! You're lucky he even performs for you!
Spilborghs was put in a difficult position...
having to bunt against an extremely tough pitcher. Neither attempt was even close to being successful and he then had only one swing against Soriano. Tracy has for the most part skillfully maneuvered players into situations where they can be successful, but if Spilly isn’t a good bunter then the manager totally wasted a valuable 9th-inning at-bat. Soriano, by the way, has given up four hits in 59 ABs with RISP!
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