After winning Friday night behind the brilliance of Tyler Chatwood, the Colorado Rockies (23-24) once again find themselves just a game below .500 with an opportunity to get back to that benchmark — and help whatever divisional hope they may have in the process — by beating the NL West rival San Francisco Giants on Saturday.
The Giants (30-20), though, will be led by lefty ace Madison Bumgarner. Connor doesn't like how Bumgarner self-polices baseball in the Brian McCann style of yelling at opponents, so that's one way to look at the North Carolina native. The other way is that, uh, he is very good. Thus far this season, Bumgarner is 6-2 with a 2.17 ERA in 10 starts. He holds a 1.12 WHIP and has whiffed 77 hitters in 66.1 innings pitched.
Obviously, with the lefty on the hill—and a very good one at that—and the Rockies already having taken care of business last night, we'll see how manager Walt Weiss stacks the club's lineup. (For what it's worth, tomorrow the Rockies are scheduled to have Chris Rusin go up against Johnny Cueto.)
But today, Bumgarner will face off against Eddie Butler, who has been a pleasant surprise since the Rockies recalled him from Triple-A Albuquerque earlier this year. Butler (2-2, 3.58) has already come quite a long way since I spoke to him at the end of spring training, and his (small sample size) good recent work maybe points to a future in the Rockies' rotation, after all.
Currently, the Rox are five-and-a-half games out of first place in the NL West and five games out of the Wild Card hunt, in this totally-not-too-early standings update. Anyways, we've got Rockies, Giants, and all the festivities going down at Coors Field in just a couple hours. Game thread will be up soon; in the meantime, chat with us here. Yay for day baseball!