After a star-spangled win on Saturday, the Sim Rockies couldn’t salvage the series against the Sim Giants. They did score four unanswered runs in the sixth and seventh innings, but that was after giving up seven straight first.
There’s something about Márquez and Hoffman
After lasting about five innings per game, Germán Márquez has now had back-to-back starts of less than five innings. On Tuesday, he was pulled after four complete innings. In this game, he was allowed to pitch into the fifth, but that came back to bite the Sim Rockies.
Márquez ended up pitching 4 2⁄3 innings, giving up six runs on nine hits, one walk, and six strikeouts.
He was relieved by Jeff Hoffman, who pitched 2 1⁄3 innings. He gave up one run on two hits, and walked one and struck out two. Hoffman pitches alright, but he can never seem to get through an outing without yielding at least one run. This outing brought his ERA down from 5.56 to 5.45.
Panda Slam
The Sim Giants started scoring in the third inning and never looked back. It started with a bases-loaded walk to Brandon Crawford to put the Sim Giants up 1-0. Hunter Pence then hit a sacrifice fly to make it 2-0.
The fifth inning is where they blew the game open thanks to Pablo Sandoval. His grand slam in the fifth ended the day for Márquez and put the Sim Giants up 6-0. Evan Longoria added a homer of his own in the sixth inning — his fourth of the year — to make it 7-0 San Francisco.
Chip, chip, chip away
The Sim Rockies tried to claw back from what looked like an imminent defeat, but they were unable to quite get over the hump.
Nolan Arenado hit an RBI groundout to score Trevor Story in the sixth to put the Sim Rockies on the board. Matt Kemp finally got his bat going as a Rockie, going 2-for-4 with a home run and a strikeout to make it 7-2 in the seventh.
Two batters later, Garrett Hampson whacked a two-run homer to left field to finalize the score at 7-4.
Up next
The Sim Rockies return to Coors Field for a three game series against the injury-riddled Sim Diamondbacks and will look to make up some ground in the division (they are only 2.5 games behind the Snakes). Jon Gray (2-7, 5.61 ERA) will battle Madison Bumgarner (9-4, 2.97 ERA). First pitch is at 6:45pm MT on Ben Kouchnerkavich’s YouTube channel!