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Rockies position players batting from the cleanup slot down went a combined 1 for 18 with eight strikeouts last night, that one hit came off the bat of Clint Barmes, who also had one of just three hits from the bottom two thirds of the lineup on Friday. Jorge De La Rosa's outing was dreadful and with our run producers so quiet, in short there's not much to like about how the Rockies are playing on this road trip save for the work of the clean-up crew in the pen and Jonathan Herrera.
Herrera's been a miniaturized version of the 2010 San Diego Padres thus far in that the source of his success has come out of nowhere and remains a mystery, leaving many of us pretty skeptical, but it's getting easier to see him sustaining it as he continues. Yesterday he was the only Rockies player who seemed capable of working the count off of Reds pitching to a desirable result (two walks, one SF, one hit) compared to the seeing a lot of pitches just to strike out results of the rest of the team.
The links:
- Rockies prospect Gomez finally plays | Inside the Colorado Rockies - Shortstop prospect Hector Gomez, sidelined more than three months with back injury, resumes season at Tri-City.
- The 10 statistical predictions we're making for the second half - Big League Stew - MLB - Yahoo! Sports - Just a side note: we like Ubaldo, and we know that there's been this weird sort of anti-Jimenez backlash in blogs which makes us a bit defensive. For instance, if pitcher wins are somewhat unpredictable and meaningless in the first place, making any sort of conclusive guess as to whether Jimenez will finish with 25 or not seems silly. He went 8-3 in the second half in 2008, and 9-3 last season. Ten more wins is going to be hard, but it's still doable. At any rate, even though we're seeing this anti-Ubaldo backlash, let's be careful not to take the frustration out on Josh Johnson of the Marlins, who's having a season for the ages himself.
- Baylor would be good for Jays | Baseball | Sports | Toronto Sun - A day after the Don Baylor wants to manage article appeared, a reporter in Toronto latched on.
- Stewart, Rockies getting better | citizen-times.com | Asheville Citizen-Times - Bad timing for this article about Ian Stewart's All Star break, as Stewart hasn't looked that good the last couple of nights.
- Rockies' road trip off to rough start in Cincinnati - The Denver Post
- Renck: Rockies scan trade winds - The Denver Post - Not much new here, the Rockies and Marlins continue to talk about Cantu and Uggla, and Ty Wigginton remains in play.
- Cook hoping his road trouble comes to a stop - The Denver Post - So am I. I kind of figured the Rockies wouldn't continue sweeping the Reds all the time they played here and I watched, but I definitely hope that regression doesn't involve a sweep by them.
Finally, a few links about our two drafted college QB's:
- http://twitter.com/troyrenck - Renck has multiple tweets on Kyle Parker likely making a decision this week (for more read here) and the Brad Hawpe/Todd Helton situations at first. I think he's lacking some historical perspective on his OBP rant, though. Great players will sustain OBP's over .370, but .350 or above would qualify as a good OBP.
- Russell Wilson gets a couple of articles as well, one from North Carolina and one from his current Tri-City home.