Casper was rained out, so I'll start at Tri-City where James Freeman pitched his first really good game of the season, allowing only two hits and two walks over six innings to go along with seven K's. I'm not sure what adjustments he's made, but I hope he keeps it up (before last night he had averaged over a walk an inning on the season). Christopher Frey reached on an error in the first and scored on Phillip Cuadrado's single for the only run of the ball game. Tri-City has always been the most extreme pitchers' park in the Rockies system (at least since we began our affiliation there) but this season has been kind of ridiculous as far as that goes - making it difficult to get a real solid read on players just by their stats alone. We have to be careful of getting too high on the pitchers there until we see how they fare at Asheville or Modesto (the combined stats from two extreme environments should balance things out) and likewise, writing off Daniel Carte and other struggling bats may be equally premature. Still Carte's offense has gotten off a lot slower than other Dust-Devils, and last night he was missing from the lineup for the first time in a while.
Asheville lost a relatively low scoring contest in extra innings (the Tourists were on the road, so the score shouldn't be surprising) yet Joe Koshansky lets his bat do the talking back to Baseball America by hitting it out of Greensboro's yard. He and Chris Nelson were the only Tourists to try and disprove the "McCormick Field Effect" by getting two hits apiece. Nelson also collected two walks to raise his season total to seventeen as he continues to battle back from his subpar start.
Tulsa split a pair, Jayson Nix went four for eight with a double over the two games and while Chris Ianetta was held hitless in the first as DH, he did collect two more hits in game two as a catcher, also throwing out speedy Royals prospect Mitch Maier once in two attempts.
Colorado Springs crushed Tacoma sixteen to two behind Aaron Cook's strong performance. JJ davis hit his first homerun for the Sky Sox (thirteenth total on the year at AAA) and Ryan Shealy hit his twentieth while Jeff Salazar and Omar Quintanilla each reached base three times as table setters and those top four in the lineup scored nine runs in all (there were five more runs added from the bottom two slots, Tomas Delarosa and Dan Conway). With both Cook and Acevedo pitching well last night, and Cook just coming off of his rehab, I'm going to include a poll question: Should the Rockies start Aaron Cook or Jose Acevedo on Saturday? The team hasn't decided yet, but I'm curious what my readers think.
Update [2005-7-26 12:58:15 by Rox Girl]: Sickels has his Rockies Preseason Top 20 review up.