Monthly Archives: May 2012

May 6, 2012

Rockies’ pitching staff in disarray

By Dave Krieger

Actually, disarray may be too mild a word for the state of the Rockies’ pitching staff after it blew early leads of 5-0 and 6-0 on consecutive nights against the Braves, scoring seventeen runs in two games and losing them both.

“That’s the worst game of the year for us,” manager Jim Tracy said after the second, Saturday night’s 13-9 throwback to the early days of baseball at altitude.

By the time it was over, the Rocks’ team earned-run average had ballooned to 5.06, worst in the National League. Esmil Rogers, who allowed five earned runs in an inning and a third, saw his ERA soar to 8.36. Edgmer Escalona is at 8.53.

“Our pitching, as I mentioned last night, it’s got to be better than what we’re seeing right now,” Tracy said in the understatement of the soggy evening at Coors Field. “It’s unacceptable. That’s the best way I can describe it.”

Generally inclined to defend his players to a fault, Tracy was critical of Rogers and Rex Brothers for lack of consistency out of the bullpen, just as he had torched Jhoulys Chacin and Guillermo Moscoso recently for short, ineffective starts.

And it’s not as though all this trouble is in the rear view. Before Saturday night’s debacle, the club was forced to abandon plans to bring Jeremy Guthrie off the disabled list for Tuesday’s game in San Diego, meaning Tracy had to tell reporters he didn’t know who would start either Tuesday’s or Wednesday’s game there. At the moment, he has three healthy starters, one of whom is 49 years old and couldn’t hold leads of 6-0 and 8-3 on Saturday.

That, of course, would be Jamie Moyer, who became the oldest player to get a hit in a big league game Saturday since 50-year-old Minnie Minoso got one for the White Sox in 1976. Heartwarming as this tale is, Moyer is trying to get batters out at Coors Field with a “fastball” clocked at 77 miles per hour, which is slower than most major league changeups. Saturday, he managed to do it for four innings before everything unraveled.

“The wheels fell off,” he said afterward. “Solo home runs usually don’t beat you, but they just chipped away, chipped away. I couldn’t get an out in the sixth. I don’t have an answer for you right now.”

After giving up two solo homers and a single to open the sixth, Moyer departed with an 8-5 lead and one runner aboard. By the time Rogers was finished pouring kerosene on the brush fire, the score was tied and the bases were loaded. By the time Brothers departed two outs later, the Braves led 12-8.

The fact that the Rocks are counting on Moyer at all is evidence of the implosion of their plans for this year’s pitching staff. Coming off Tommy John surgery and old enough to be most of his teammates’ father, Moyer was a non-roster invitee to spring training, the longest of long shots. The Rockies had nine starters ahead of him when pitchers and catchers reported in February.

After trading Ubaldo Jimenez for three pitchers from Cleveland, Seth Smith for two pitchers from Oakland and Chris Iannetta for a pitcher from the L.A. Angels, it looked as though they’d have enough starters to staff both the big league club and the Triple-A affiliate in Colorado Springs. Instead, it’s as if they all caught some awful, contagious disease.

Josh Outman, one of the pitchers from Oakland, got hurt. Guillermo Moscoso, the other pitcher from Oakland, was ineffective. So were Tyler Chatwood, the pitcher from the Angels, and Alex White, one of the pitchers from Cleveland. Only one of these four had to pitch well enough to bump Moyer from consideration. None of them did.

Jhoulys Chacin, the Rockies’ winningest pitcher last year, showed up out of shape and pitched to an ERA of 7.30 before being shipped out. Guthrie, the fitness freak obtained from Baltimore who rides a bicycle to the ballpark, had some sort of chain problem that crashed his bike, leaving him with a shoulder injury and a trip to the disabled list.

So here they are, with two healthy starters under the age of forty-nine — Juan Nicasio and rookie Drew Pomeranz — and just nine quality starts in twenty-six games, fewest in the National League. The bullpen, which started well, has been called upon way too much and is already fried. There are no quick fixes, either. If there were, you can bet the Yankees and Red Sox would have bought them up already.

The good news is Nicasio and Pomeranz pitch the next two. Each went at least six innings in his last start, which makes them marathon men in comparison to the rest of the Rockies’ staff.

The bad news is nobody is quite sure what happens after that. Christian Friedrich, the Rocks’ first-round draft pick in 2008, last pitched at Triple-A on Friday, which would make the timing right for Wednesday’s start in San Diego. He wasn’t exactly lights out, giving up five runs, three earned, in five and two-thirds innings, but the Rocks don’t have a lot of options. His overall ERA of 3.00 in thirty innings isn’t bad, particularly for the Pacific Coast League.

White last pitched for the Sky Sox on Tuesday, managing just four and two-thirds innings. Outman is on his way back from an oblique injury and a long way from being ready to go deep into a game as a starter. Chacin and Moscoso were just recently banished to Colorado Springs because they pitched so poorly.

So while Tracy declined to speculate, the options include Carlos Torres, recently called up from Triple-A to be a long relief man, and Friedrich. But stay tuned. Television analyst George Frazier and his son, Parker, now at Double-A Tulsa, might be options by the time the team arrives in San Diego.

All of this is having the depressing effect you might expect on the rest of the clubhouse. The Rocks are tied for second in the National League in runs, but when you score eight and nine in consecutive games and lose them both, that’s not much consolation.

“It’s hard when you go down like this after scoring six runs early in the game and feeling excited when things are going well early in the game,” said Carlos Gonzalez, who had four hits Saturday to raise his team-leading batting average to .323.

“Everything just blew up in the middle of the game. We just have to hold the other team and continue to score runs if we need to. It’s difficult. It’s a tough loss and I’m really tired of saying the same things over and over. We need to figure it out and just try to get that ‘W’.”

Rockies management might be forgiven if this were an isolated run of bad luck. After all, Moscoso made twenty-one starts for Oakland last season and pitched to an ERA of 3.38. Outman made nine more. Chatwood made twenty-five for the Angels. The Rockies have gotten two forgettable starts from Moscoso and none from the others.

But this organization has been struggling to assemble a competent pitching staff for years, and it has made some whopper mistakes with pitchers early in the the draft, most notably selecting Greg Reynolds with the second overall pick in 2006, in the process passing on Clayton Kershaw and Tim Lincecum, now the aces of two of their rivals in the National League West. At some point, you have to ask whether the existing management is capable of judging pitching talent, whether in the draft or the trade and free agent markets. Pitching at altitude poses unique difficulties, but you can’t do worse than last in the league.

Of course, those organizational questions are not Tracy’s concern at the moment. He just needs to find somebody — anybody — who can get people out. Preferably this week.

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May 5, 2012

How to irritate Kobe Bryant (It’s not that hard)

By Dave Krieger

You take your thrills where they come in this business, and one of them is annoying Kobe Bryant. It’s easy to do. You just have to suggest someone shut him down on a basketball court. That does the trick every time.

This is because Kobe considers himself unguardable. Or, at least, he has yet to meet the human capable of doing it. So if he has a bad game — as he did Friday night, missing sixteen of twenty-three shots as the Nuggets beat the Lakers for the first time in their playoff series — there is always some reason other than whoever was guarding him. He was off, his teammates didn’t do enough, he was unaccountably shooting from the wrong spots. Something.

So I took my turn in Kobe’s wheelhouse when he showed up in the Pepsi Center interview room as Friday prepared to give way to Saturday.

First, I asked if JaVale McGee’s offense had surprised him. McGee was the Nuggets’ second-leading scorer in Game 3, behind Ty Lawson, after not being much of an offensive factor in the first two games in Los Angeles. McGee’s teammates credited his big night — sixteen points, fifteen rebounds, three blocks, two steals, two assists and just one turnover — with a major role in the Nuggets’ victory.

“No,” said Bryant, who admits to being surprised only slightly more often than he admits to being well defended. “He did what I know he can do — running hooks, big spin moves, scoop shots with his left hand. Those are things he’s capable of.”

Thus encouraged, I trod deeper into the unthinkable, asking if Danilo Gallinari’s length had bothered him. Nuggets coach George Karl deployed the 23-year-old, 6-foot-10-inch forward on Bryant for much of the second half, during which Kobe took eleven shots and made two.

Bryant smirked. Was I serious? Yes, I said. That’s a real question.

“Sure,” Bryant said, still smirking, sounding at least as sincere as Dr. House. “Somewhat real answer.”

Just in case his opinion of the question, and perhaps of Gallinari, wasn’t clear enough, he added a sardonic postscript to his final response of the night, in which he attributed the Lakers’ first defeat of the postseason to a single statistic:

“We shot six for twenty-five from the three-point line. We can’t do that,” he said. And then, in his best deadpan:

“And Gallo’s defense was exceptional.”

It should come as no surprise that Bryant would never admit being bothered, certainly not by a player with as brief an NBA resume as Gallinari, whether or not he was. In response to a similar question earlier, Karl suggested Gallo had been the Nuggets’ best defensive matchup on Bryant, owing chiefly to his length. Bryant can shoot over anyone, Karl said, but it’s a little harder over Gallinari.

The Italian forward is likely to continue to get the most minutes checking Bryant, Karl said, although Arron Afflalo and Corey Brewer will share the duty.

“I don’t think you want to go one way on Kobe Bryant,” Karl said.

Kobe’s explanation for his offensive struggles credited the Nuggets’ scheme, but no individual defenders.

“I wasn’t on my sweet spots,” he said. “They tried to do some things defensively. They tried to keep me more on the perimeter. I wasn’t in the post a lot. I lived at the elbow the first two games and we got away from that a little bit in the second half. Pau (Gasol) as well, we saw him on the perimeter way too much. We can’t do that. We have to stick to our ground and pound game.”

Bryant has described this season’s Lakers as a championship-caliber squad, and he seemed to view their first playoff loss as a minor bump in the road, calling it “a good learning experience” for the team’s younger players.

For the Nuggets, the formula for success was the usual — outhustling their opponent.

“The game for us is all about our energy and our enthusiasm to play,” Karl said. “It’s not complicated for us. When we play poorly, it’s because we don’t play with enough energy, we don’t push the pace and we shoot too many jump shots.”

He credited the “intensity and guts of JaVale and Kenneth (Faried) and all our bigs” as well as Lawson’s thirteen-point first quarter, which helped the Nuggets build a 30-14 lead after one. The Lakers fought their way back, but by the time they got within striking distance, they were out of gas. The Nuggets took the fourth quarter 27-19 to win going away, 99-84, before a raucous full house.

Like everything else the Nuggets did well, Karl attributed McGee’s big night to aggressiveness. “I think he was working underneath the defense,” he said. “With all the penetration we put in the game, their big guys are always helping uphill and helping out of position a bit.”

Lakers coach Mike Brown also credited the Nuggets’ energy:

“Denver played a great game,” he said. “I thought Ty Lawson came out being very aggressive. We’ve been talking to our guys about him coming out and being aggressive the last couple of days. I thought he was very impactful to start the game to help them get out by however many they got out. I thought that Denver’s two bigs, Faried and McGee, brought a lot of energy to the table for their team. The twelve offensive rebounds for the two, the thirty overall, plus the double-double in points with them also bringing twenty-eight points to the table between the two was a very, very good game for those guys.”

Karl tweaked his starting lineup for Game 3, replacing Kosta Koufos with Timofey Mozgov as the starting center. Mozgov played fourteen minutes and failed to score, but he did establish a more physical tone than Koufos had, banging willingly with Lakers center Andrew Bynum, who was shut out in the first half before putting up eighteen points after intermission. Still, McGee came off the bench to play most of the minutes at center.

Can the Nuggets repeat the feat Sunday to even the series at two games apiece and turn it into a best-of-three, or was this their token win in the usual five-game first-round elimination?

“Every game we’ve played we’ve been down to the Lakers,” Lawson said. “We’ve been down big and always trying to fight back. We wanted to make it a point to come out early and see how they did with a deficit, and they reacted well to it, but we held on.

“We dealt with having a big lead. We dealt with them coming back and making it a game. Nobody got nervous, so we learned a lot today and it’s probably going to help us out throughout the series.”

If Kobe responds to his poor shooting night with a big game Sunday, as he often does, I wouldn’t be surprised if he revisits the question of Gallinari’s defense, just to pound home how stupid he considered the question. Bryant enjoys few things more than the “I told you so” moment.

In Kobe’s world, the only one who can stop Kobe is Kobe. The great ones generally feel that way. The difference with Kobe is he makes no attempt to disguise it with false modesty or humility. He oozes arrogance. The only way to wipe the smirk off his face is to end his season prematurely, which remains a decidedly uphill battle for the Nuggets.

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May 3, 2012

Rockies hitters still covering for lousy pitching

By Dave Krieger

Jason Giambi’s 429th career home run won the Rockies both a game and a series in dramatic walk-off fashion Wednesday, but the team is still struggling to get a disappointing pitching staff together.

“I knew I hit it good when I got it,” Giambi said on the Dave Logan Show just minutes after his three-run bomb in the bottom of the ninth gave the Rocks an 8-5 win in the rubber match of their first series of the season against the Dodgers.

“It’s kind of a like a warm butter knife through butter. It’s just nice and easy and free. I was just excited to get it up in the air because I knew that’s what we needed in that situation. It’s always exciting when it goes out of the park and you get met at home plate. That’s what keeps you coming back every year. You can’t get that feeling anywhere else on the planet. That’s what keeps me training and working out and coming back.”

The Rocks got a rare quality start Wednesday, just their ninth in twenty-four games, which is tied for worst in the National League. Rookie Drew Pomeranz gave them their first look at the dominance general manager Dan O’Dowd was betting on when he made Pomeranz the centerpiece of last summer’s Ubaldo Jimenez trade.

Still, with the bullpen taxed from so many short starts, setup men Matt Belisle and Rex Brothers couldn’t hold a 2-1 lead in the eighth and closer Rafael Betancourt couldn’t hold a 5-3 lead in the ninth.

On the bright side, the lineup kept bouncing back. After the Dodgers went up 3-2 in the eighth, Carlos Gonzalez hit his second homer of the game off Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw. After L.A. tied it in the ninth, Giambi delivered the game-winner with CarGo waiting on deck. All three homers by the left-handed hitters came off left-handed pitchers.

“The exciting part is last year I think we would have gave away that game,” Giambi said. “But this year it’s been a lot of these games where we’ve kept fighting and not let it get us down offensively when they’ve come back and tied the game or even went ahead. We’re starting to grow as a ball club. The maturity level of the younger players is starting to come through. Hopefully this is the win that jump starts us to start playing a lot better baseball.”

Obviously, that can’t happen until the pitching improves. Manager Jim Tracy finally got fed up Tuesday when Jhoulys Chacin put his team in a 7-0 hole, allowing four runs before an out was recorded. The Rocks battled back but lost 7-6. Tracy called the starting effort “awful,” and Chacin, the team’s winningest pitcher last season, was optioned to Triple-A Colorado Springs the next day. The Rockies are last in the National League in opponent batting average (.287), tied for last in quality starts and next to last in earned-run average (4.69). Yet they’re 12-12.

“We’re playing good baseball, but we haven’t played great, and I think our best baseball is yet to come,” Giambi said. “We’re starting to cinch up a few things. Our defense is getting better. Our bats are getting better. We’re starting to figure it out on the mound. Unfortunately, we just need to get some of these starters to go a little bit deeper in the game because our bullpen’s tired. Skipper’s having to give a lot of guys days off in the bullpen just because we’re not getting the length that we need. And I think that’s going to happen. They’re working on it and that’s the best you can do.”

There are hopeful signs. Pomeranz threw 6 2/3 innings Wednesday, giving up just one run, his longest outing of the season so far. Juan Nicasio threw six in Colorado’s 6-2 victory over the Dodgers in the series opener. Jamie Moyer has been better than anyone had a right to expect from a 49-year-old coming off Tommy John surgery. Jorge De La Rosa has begun a series of minor league rehab starts following his own Tommy John surgery. Barring setbacks, he could be back in the big leagues by the end of the month. And while Jeremy Guthrie had a lousy start, once he recovers from his bicycle crash he should revert to his own history as a reliable innings eater.

In the meantime, CarGo is red-hot and basically carrying the team. He has fourteen runs batted in over the past six games.

“He just oozes with talent,” Giambi said. “You could always tell that he was a phenomenal player. I know he kind of went around the league a little bit, but you could tell the talent was always there. We would always say in New York when he was with Oakland, like, ‘Who’s this CarGo kid?’ He would play one day and hit a few bullets and the next couple days he wouldn’t play. We were like, ‘Why isn’t that guy in the lineup?’

“I think he was just trying to find his way and he’s finally starting to come into his own. This kid is going to be as good as he wants to be. He’s one of those guys, you look at the A-Rods, the Jeters, the Rickey Hendersons that I’ve played with, he’s going to be as good as he wants to be. He’s putting in the work and he’s trying to learn and he asks a lot of questions because he wants to better.”

So the Rocks are keeping their heads above water while sorting out the pitching. Guillermo Moscoso has already been called up to fill in for Guthrie while he’s on the disabled list. The Rocks called up right-hander Carlos Torrez on Thursday but it’s not clear whether he’ll take Chacin’s turn on Monday or the club will make another move before that. Torrez, who pitched for the White Sox in 2009 and 2010 and in Japan last season, was starting for the Sky Sox, but averaging only five innings per outing. Alex White and Christian Friedrich are also possibilities to be recalled from the Springs to make Chacin’s next start.

In the meantime, Giambi likes the fight he’s seen in the early going and credits the addition of veterans to the roster — Marco Scutaro, Ramon Hernandex, Michael Cuddyer — with providing some of the resilience.

“We’ve had some meetings and I’ve had a lot of meetings with the younger kids saying that I’m proud of them this year, where before we would take a lead and if the other team came back or went ahead, we kind of went in shut-down mode and didn’t keep pushing,” Giambi said.

“We’ve really turned the corner this year of doing that. It’s exciting to watch. I think it’s helped out to have a few more veterans around to help these younger kids get through it, and they’re responding.”

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May 1, 2012

Frank Deford on the state of sportswriting

By Dave Krieger

Frank Deford is one of the most celebrated sportswriters in American history, but he admits to some concern about the present state of the trade that made him famous.

“The trouble is that people are not doing enough reporting today,” Deford said on the Dave Logan Show in advance of a trip to Denver later this week. To be fair, I had sort of led the witness, suggesting that amid the cacophony of voices in cyberspace these days, many sportswriters seem more inclined to self-promotion than journalism.

“They’re just offering their opinions,” Deford said. “And if somebody doesn’t do the reporting in the first place, then there’s nothing to offer opinions about, because you don’t know anything. That’s what scares me, not just about sportswriting, but journalism in general. If newspapers or whoever are not going to pay people to spend time really digging up facts, then we’re all going to suffer because we’re not going to get information, we’re just going to get people shooting their mouths off. And unfortunately, that happens all too often.”

Deford has been plying his trade at the highest level for fifty years, since joining Sports Illustrated straight out of Princeton in 1962. His career will be celebrated Friday night when the Denver Press Club presents him with its Damon Runyon Award, named for another legendary American sportswriter. The most recent of Deford’s eighteen books is a history of the craft: Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter. He will sign copies of the book at the Tattered Cover on East Colfax beginning at 7:30 p.m. Thursday.

“The best break I ever got was I went to Sports Illustrated at the lowest level, as a researcher out of college,” he said. “But I had been at Princeton. As a senior, a freshman on the team, and in those days a freshman could not play on the varsity, (was) a guy named Bill Bradley. And nobody had ever heard of him. So I go to Sports Illustrated and I say, ‘You guys aren’t going to believe this, but the best sophomore in the country this coming year is a guy at Princeton.’ And they all laughed and said, ‘You’re just an old (Princeton) Tiger there.’

“Of course, I turned out to be right, and it made me look very, very smart. They gave me a chance to write a story on Bill, and he turned out to be even better than I had boasted. That was really my start. They paid attention to me after that. I’ve told Bill often that he’s responsible for my career.”

Among the changes to sportswriting over the half-century he’s practiced it is a dramatic reduction in the access to players writers enjoy.

“I was really lucky I came along when I did,” Deford said. “It was a long time ago, this was back in the 1960s, but I think it extended into the seventies and maybe even into the eighties, in which you could get to know athletes.

“First of all, there just weren’t as many journalists around, and secondly, the athletes, I think, were a little more willing to talk to you. They didn’t make as much money and they weren’t all hidden behind gated communities. They held real jobs in the offseason and they were like you; they weren’t making a whole lot more money than you, the writer. So there was a facility on their part to sit down and talk. They treated us like human beings. And I know there’s a lot of that that still goes around, but by the same token I think players now are a lot more wary of the press because they don’t know when they’re going to get burned. They don’t trust the press as much as they used to, and a lot of them have a real reason not to.”

Among a younger generation of sports fans, Deford may be better known these days as a correspondent for HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, where he’s been a regular since 1995.

“Being a TV journalist, the producers do all the work,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not supposed to say that. Scott Pelley and Steve Kroft and those guys of60 Minutes, everybody thinks they do everything, and you don’t. You get an awful lot of help. Whereas being a writer, you pretty much do everything yourself, (starting with) making your own plane reservations and getting places. You do get a lot more help and it’s a lot more collegial, being in television.

“I think the other thing is, as a writer, you have your opinion, which you can express much more. I think television, the visual, shows you and doesn’t give you the chance to expand the way that I did as a writer. I would not only write a story, but I would let people know how I felt about the person that I was writing about. I think you have a lot more leeway as a writer. And the guys who are doing it still do. So there’s no question there’s a difference. Both of them have their strengths.”

Unlike most TV work, where a two-and-a-half minute story is considered in-depth reporting. Real Sports allows Deford to be about as expansive as he was as a back-of-the-book takeout writer at SI.

“Writing’s still my first love,” he said. “But Real Sports does give you the opportunity that’s so seldom there on television. I mean, a segment on Real Sports is like a Dostoevsky novel compared to what you usually get on television. You have a real chance to do some stuff. I’ll always be a writer first, but I very much enjoy the time I spend on Real Sports, working with some very good people and doing the same thing, essentially. I’m telling stories. That’s it. That’s what people love and they have going back to the caveman days.”

Still, Deford is not altogether happy about the evolution of his original trade. I asked if he thought sportswriters today render athletes as completely as they once did, considering their more limited access.

“No, I don’t think so at all,” he said. “Back when I was doing it, and even as recently as maybe twenty-five years ago, you walk up to a guy and say, ‘Hey, I’d like to do a story on you.’ (And he’d say,) ‘Sure, let’s go.’  And have a cup of coffee, go out to dinner, whatever. You had the chance to talk to them, get to know them and really get to feel them.

“The players come along now, and let’s be honest, they sort of are born almost by the time they get to the major leagues, to know how to handle writers. It’s all very standardized. They’ve seen how athletes treat writers and treat guys on television. They give very, very standard answers, very careful answers. They don’t really let themselves be natural. And so it isn’t the writer’s fault so much. You’re so restricted.

“I can’t remember the first time that a P.R. guy ever sat down with me when I was interviewing an athlete, but it sure wasn’t the case for a long, long time. It was usually, sit on a plane, chat, have dinner, have a drink, chat, and really get to know somebody as a human being. And I think when that’s the case you feel so much more comfortable writing about someone because you have the confidence that you really know this guy. And if you don’t, you’re going to write a standard story with standard quotes. It’s a shame.”

You can find more information about Friday’s Damon Runyon Award banquethere. You can find more information on his book signing at the Tattered Coverhere.

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