I'm not sure why Thomas Harding at the official site seems so intent on dissing Chris Iannetta after he came up with a big game for us yesterday, but this paragraph in his recap stood out to me:
Fellow rookie Iannetta, whose fourth-inning RBI triple was his first extra-base hit since he had two doubles at AT&T Park on May 1, and Matt Holliday, who drove in two runs with a triple during a three-run fifth, built the Rockies' 4-1 lead.
Alright, besides the fact that the sentence shouldn't really be it's own paragraph to begin with, there's an implication there that Iannetta has been in some sort of month long slump since our last trip to San Francisco. First of all, Iannetta's last extra base hits were actually a triple and homerun on May 5 against the Reds. Second, since that May 1 game against the Giants, Chris had a grand total of 35 plate appearances before yesterday. Since his last actual XBH against Cincinnati, the homerun off of Todd Coffey, Iannetta had only 27 AB's before tripling yesterday. Now, let's just for the sake of comparison talk about our other catcher, whose last extra base hit was May 15. Since then, Yorvit Torrealba has gone 22 AB's without another one. Prior to that double against the Diamondbacks, Yorvit had gone 37 AB's between his previous extra base hit on April 24. Torrealba has hit zero homeruns and zero triples this season. And guess which catcher the brilliant media folks at the Denver Post want to get rid of.
Anyway, the Rox do have some friends in the media, I love this quote from Dave Krieger's column in the Rocky Mountain News this morning:
Maybe the best news of all is shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, who drove in the winning run in the 10th inning of Sunday's win. In response to my earlier praise of Tulo, I've gotten mail listing Neifi Perez, Juan Uribe and Clint Barmes as previously hyped Rockies shortstops. No knock on those guys, but if you don't see a difference between Tulo and them, you might be primarily a football fan.
A little more Tulo praise came from Tracy Ringolsby's recap, also in the RMN:
"He's unbelievable," first baseman Todd Helton said. "He has that quiet confidence. . . . I think his defense is carrying over to his offense. He is playing so well defensively.
Tulo still ranks tops in the MLB in hitting in these late, high leveraged situations. Yet a look at his hitting the rest of the time leaves a somewhat ho-hum impression of his season to date. I guess this is just a warning that when you argue about how fantastic a player Tulowitzki is to stat oriented people, be prepared for condescending smiles of how much a simpleton you are. At least for now. I have a feeling that given his stellar GB+LD rate, and improving contact, that he'll be climbing the VORP roll rapidly over the next couple of months.