Rockies 4, White Sox 6: Rox Blow Early Lead, Bullpen Devoured in Todd Helton's 2000th Career Game

Nowhere to go but up from here.

1. i had no idea this was an afternoon game, and now have nothing else to do tonight.
2. reading the play-by-play of this game on my At-Bat 2011 on my phone was like reading a freaking novel, and not a good one.
3. it’s sad tracy decided not to go with the whole A-team for todd’s 2000th.
4. wiggy 7 LOB. no further comment necessary.
5. why was cook pulled after like 85 pitches? he wasnt lights out but he seemed to have pitched around the trouble that he had.
6. when ozzie guillen gets hired by the marlins for next season, he will fit right in in the NL; there were more double-switches, position shifts, and bullpen moves in this game than you could shake a stick at.

On a game by game basis they’re consistently mediocre. They show up in one or two aspects on any particular day/night, but never all of them. Worse than that is that there’s not much changing this season. No one gobbling up salary that we can and would want to dump. No easily pluggable holes (and really no glaring holes at all besides 2B). Nobody in the springs to wait for, now that Blackmon and Brothers made it. Nope. All that’s left to do in 2011 is:

1) Wait and see if Rosario gets called up in September
2) Hope Ubaldo can finish stronger than he started so we still feel like we have the “real” Ubaldo when 2012 rolls around
3) Hope Giambi gets traded to someone who can get him a ring
4) Wait for good news on JDLR’s recovery

And I think that sums it up. To all the positive people around here who are shocked/furious at those of us writing off the season, I’ll happily come around and eat crow if they threaten for a playoff spot. My prediction: somewhere between 84 and 78 wins, about 10ish games off the pace. Sigh. Thanks Rockies! You really know how to follow up an encouraging win with some depressing losses.

I don’t really mean that word exactly, but I don’t have a better one. Obviously, they’re mostly – or all – good guys who don’t do stupid ass things off the field. But there are certain things that professional baseball players at the highest level (really all professional athletes) do that we either don’t or do poorly, and have nothing to do with raw physical talent. Among them:

1. Think with pitchers, realize the patterns they’re seeing, and respond/adjust to them. We’re just awful at this, and incredibly stubborn.
2. Change our approach in high leverage situations to get “enough” done, instead of failing to do “everything.” Shorten our swings, inside out a blooper away from the defense, block a sacrifice fly to medium center field. Ease up the velocity to hit some spots, and change speeds to get overly aggressive hitters out with RISP.
3. Pick our spots to be aggressive on the basepaths.

There are many more. I really do think all the talk around this team of how immensely talented they are has f#$#ked with their heads. They aren’t learning the, for want of a better word, veteran tricks that are crucial to winning games at this level. #1 above completely killed Stewart’s and Fowler’s career, in fact.

Very very frustrating. And though agree 99% of this is on the players, the only thing I can see left to try is dump Tracy, hire some sort of hard-ass old guy and see if we can clean this thing up. Probably wouldn’t work, either, and would be unfair to Tracy, but that’s where we’re at.

This team has underperformed all year and it’s no longer a small sample size. Halfway through the season, the Rockies do not look to make the playoffs without a spark. Jim Tracy, sadly, should probably be removed and replaced with somebody who has some new ideas and can especially make better in-game decisions.

If Betancourt isn’t 100 percent (and he sure doesn’t appear to be), I would like to see him do a DL stint that includes the AS break. Last year he had a bad patch just like this, and I wondered if age had finally caught up with him. Then he got a little rest, came back after the break and puts up monster, monster numbers.

If he’s fallen out of the late-inning role anyway, maybe let Reynolds or Rogers or someone give him a breather and just hope against hope he can repeat last year’s second half. Might be worth a thought.

Oh man, what a book. Guy ran in the ‘36 Olympics and then spent the war years getting shot at and crashing in planes, drifting in the south pacific with no food and water for 40+ days and then ending up in a hellish Japanese POW camp getting beaten mercilessly for years. And he just kept going. If you ever think your life has gotten tough, it will do you good to read what these bad-ass MF’ers went through in the camps and managed to survive and make lives for themselves.

100% true story and impossible book to put down.