Brewers 11, Rockies 10: Offense finally shows up, pitching gives it all back

The Colorado Rockies finally showed what it can be capable of by scoring nine runs in the first four innings of the game. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough as the Brewers came back from a 9-3 deficit to win the game 11-10 in extra innings. There was plenty of blame to go around in this game as almost every pitcher struggled, though a few did keep any runs from scoring, and the offense couldn’t keep the pressure up.

Regression wins out

Chad Bettis has had a phenomenal start to the season despite the peripherals not always matching the dominance. Unfortunately for him, regression caught up in a hurry in one game. Bettis gave up 10 hits and three walks in five innings of work which resulted in seven earned runs. Now that he’s got that out of the way, hopefully he can have another great stretch.

Thankfully for the Rockies and Bettis, the Rockies offense had their own regression tonight, and theirs was in the positive direction. The Rockies offense has struggled to score runs even in games where their base runner totals should have resulted in guys crossing home plate. The Rockies took care of that in the third and fourth innings as they scored three and five runs respectively. They sent eight batters to the plate in the third and 10 more in the fourth as they chased Brandon Woodruff from the game.

However, they couldn’t break their trend of late-game offensive woes as the couldn’t score again after the six inning while the Brewers clawed their way back into the game and eventually took the lead in the 10th inning.

#Coors

As we’ve seen repeatedly, good pitching can overcome the tendency of Coors Field to inflate hits and runs. However, when the pitching isn’t sharp, Coors Field can result in wild games like tonight. Both starting pitchers allowed seven earned runs and neither bullpen was particularly sharp as they allowed the run totals to continue to inflate throughout the game.

The Rockies and Brewers combined for 21 runs, 33 hits and 43 baserunners. As is the usual standard, Coors played a bigger factor in it’s massive outfield resulting in hits dropping in than in an unusually high number of home runs. Unfortunately, Coors tendency to let deep fly balls to right carry out of the park reared it’s ugly head at the worst possible time when Manny Pina’s home run barely carried over the fence to tie the game in the ninth inning with two outs against Wade Davis.

Double Double Play

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I’ll let these two videos write a book on why Trevor Story has become one of the best defensive shortstops in baseball.