Category Archives: Rockies/MLB

July 16, 2012

How to pitch at Coors Field

By Dave Krieger

Jeremy Guthrie might be this season’s highest-profile meltdown of a pitcher new to Coors Field, but he’s not exactly the lone ranger:

Guillermo Moscoso had an earned-run average of 3.38 last season for Oakland, mostly as a starter. Obtained by the Rockies with Josh Outman in exchange for outfielder Seth Smith, his ERA was 8.23 in two big league stints before being returned to the minor leagues. It was 11.21 at Coors; 2.79 elsewhere.

Outman had a 3.70 ERA for the A’s last season. In his first year with the Rocks, that number is 9.00. He, too, has been returned to the minors.

Tyler Chatwood, obtained from the Angels for catcher Chris Iannetta, had an ERA of 4.75 in the American League as a 21-year-old. At 22, for the Rocks, his ERA is 7.62. Like the others, he is now a minor leaguer.

So it seems worth getting some insight into the specific difficulties pitchers face making their pitches in the less-dense air a mile above sea level. Unfortunately, when you go looking for big league hurlers who found a way to succeed at Coors and are willing to talk about it, you find it’s a pretty small group.

No one has taken the mound more often for the Rockies over the past three seasons than reliever Matt Belisle. He led the team in appearances two years ago with 76 and again last year with 74. This season he leads with 45 through 88 games, one back of the league leader, Shawn Camp of the Cubs. In a year in which the Rocks were determined to get Belisle’s appearances below 70, he’s on a pace for 83.

He also leads the club in earned-run average at 2.25, a number that was 1.88 before he was charged with two runs Saturday night against the Phillies. The previous two seasons he compiled ERAs of 2.93 (2010) and 3.25 (2011) — microscopic by Rockies standards. His splits this year are 2.92 at Coors and 1.54 elsewhere.

He wasn’t feeling great Saturday night after giving up two extra-base hits down the right field line in the ninth, but he was accommodating, as always. I started by asking if there are pitches he eliminates from his repertoire at altitude or pitches he relies on more at sea level.

“I guess the answer to that question is yes,” he said. “Do I eliminate? No. I know what happens to the spin or the bite, so to speak, on my off-speed pitches here compared to other places. The break size is going to be different. Sometimes the speed is different. So I’ve had to learn how to adapt my sights, my vision of where I’m releasing the ball, to make sure that I compensate for the lack of bite. So I guess what I’m trying to say is when we leave here, my rotation seems a little tighter and I get better snap on my pitches.

“All that means is I have to adapt and focus more on locating here and when I do mix speeds, to make sure that the arm speed’s there and the approach is extremely aggressive. When you’re feeling good with your spin, sometimes you can get away with sort of flipping one in there. You can’t do that here. That kind of got me in trouble tonight, actually.

“So I think it’s just an adaptability of focus. Is it a change? Yes. How significant it is I think is up to the person.”

Although Rockies pitchers tend to avoid talking about the effects of altitude publicly for fear of sounding like they’re making excuses, they do discuss it frequently among themselves. Complicating those discussions is the fact that altitude seems to act differently on each pitcher and each pitch. There are few rules that work for everybody.

“We’ve all talked about it in here,” Belisle said. “Some people have their arsenal change in similar fashions and some are a little different. So I think it’s up to the individual to really acknowledge what you have and what’s going on and just really focus on (keeping the ball) lower and understanding that the break will be a little different.

“Five out of seven of the guys in the bullpen may say their curve ball suffers, but two of them may say, ‘Actually my curve ball’s great; it’s my slider that has problems.’

“But that’s the same phenomenon as one guy can throw the exact same baseball and it feels like a bowling ball and the other guy, it feels light. It’s what he can do with the snap. So there is a change. It’s just something you have to adapt to.”

The modern emphasis on radar guns and computerized strike zones on television may give fans the impression that pitching is science, but it’s much more art. From one outing to another, a pitcher’s feel of his pitches may change dramatically. Altitude adds yet another variable.

Breaking pitches are more vulnerable because, lacking the velocity of the fastball, they sit up begging to be crushed if they lack their customary snap. But the lighter air can also affect the downward plane of the sinker, or two-seam fastball, leaving it, like the breaking ball, sitting up too high in the strike zone.

“It could be all of them, but I think everybody’s more affected with the breaking balls, the off-speed pitches,” Belisle said. “The fastball/sinker does change a little bit as well. Sometimes it may run instead of really corkscrew down.

“Then when you go on the road, you’ve got to kind of make sure and re-set because all of a sudden the bite’s a little more, so the same pitch that was a strike for my curve ball may be a ball if I’m throwing it at the exact same release point, so I’ve got to kind of change that.”

So you have a different release point at altitude than you do at sea level?

“Yeah, because my sight has to change. We’re talking very small.”

Is that a mechanical adjustment?

“Well, not so much a mechanical adjustment as it is the timing of when I release the pitch, when I say it’s a different release point.”

So it’s the same arm slot, but you may have to release the ball a little earlier or a little later?

“Correct. I may have to get rid of the ball a little later in Colorado and not even think about it so much on the road. But if I’m here for a week and then go on the road, while I’m playing catch, I’ll get a feel of, OK, that one was a strike in Colorado but now it’s a ball because it bit a lot more.”

So the pitch that was a strike in Colorado ends up in the dirt at sea level because of the added break?

“Right. But my biggest thing is, it’s not a crutch. It’s not an excuse. It’s just, it is what it is. It’s a condition that we have to work with. The same thing if you get a ball that the rub is really bad or if you’ve got a wet ball that day.

“There’s plenty of things that are thrown at us to try to gain inconsistency in this game. I don’t think we need to allow any of this to be an excuse or a crutch because we’re here long enough to where we can adapt to it. It’s significant, it is something there, but you just have to really be on top of yourself to work on it every day, understand what you need to do.”

I asked if Belisle has noticed fellow pitchers who have trouble dealing psychologically with these constant adjustments.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I know we all talk about it. I know anybody who’s new that comes over here in the past four years that I’ve been here, we talk about it and address it. But that’s up to the individual. We as teammates need to make sure we’re not using anything as an excuse, but whatever cards you’re dealt, whatever you feel that day, you’ve got to figure out and adapt how you’re going to get the guy out because you sure as heck can.

“Maybe some people can use it as a negative, but I try to look at it as an opportunity. If I can become so adept at understanding what my pitches are doing, make those adjustments here and then go on the road and feel like I’ve got even more snap with better, nasty, slow-speed pitches, and then we come here and I can adapt to that again, where a visiting team comes in and really has a tough time because they don’t play here, I feel like that’s an opportunity for me to learn myself better and really take it as a mental challenge to be tougher, because I will not allow excuses. So I look at it more as an opportunity. It’s a fight, but it’s an opportunity.”

I pointed out the dramatic deterioration in the numbers of all four potential starters — Guthrie, Moscoso, Outman and Chatwood — brought in from other organizations this year. These were adequate major league pitchers last season who suddenly can’t get anybody out, I said.

“Yeah. I don’t know what to tell you,” Belisle said. “I mean, pitching’s not easy, period. But all I can say is acknowledge that with most people there is a change in your stuff. And we all have to adapt and be on top of that. You have to do that to the best of your ability and look at it as an opportunity and do not use it as an excuse.”

You can see where the need for constant adjustments in release point would seem like a nightmare from an organizational point of view. The goal of many pitching coaches is to get their charges to find the right delivery mechanics and then repeat them over and over until they become second nature. If you’re constantly fiddling with your release point depending on where you’re pitching, that consistency of repetition is impossible to achieve.

Many fans point to opposing pitchers who come to Colorado and dominate in a single outing — say, C.J. Wilson of the Angels before the All-Star break or Cole Hamels of the Phillies on Sunday. But pitching at Coors once a year is very different from pitching there on a regular basis. Mike Hampton succeeded for half a season before crashing. Ubaldo Jimenez had a sensational first half in 2010 (15-1, 2.20), wilted in the second half (4-7, 3.80) and has not been the same since. It’s not clear if the wear is more mental or physical.

At the All-Star game, Wilson said he basically eliminated his two-seam fastball in his lone start here because he had more confidence in the lateral movement of his cutter than the downward movement of his sinker at altitude. But in a park that puts such a premium on keeping the ball down, the Rocks as an organization can hardly afford to eliminate the two-seamer from the staff repertoire.

Still, as Guthrie demonstrated Saturday night, it can take an inning to get a feel for the release point that keeps the ball down and one bad inning at Coors can be all it takes to ruin a start.

It’s also probably easier for relievers such as Belisle to make those constant adjustments since each outing is so much shorter than it is for starters. This is one of the reasons for the Rockies’ recent pitch limits on starters — to make their focus more like that of a reliever.

It’s not clear whether the failure of any Rockies starter to sustain success over a career is a function of the extra physical effort required to make balls move at altitude, the potential for injury created by constantly changing release points or the mental strain of the battle.

But Belisle’s description of his mental approach suggests that perhaps the most important attribute of a pitcher donning a Rockies uniform is mental discipline — the ability to view pitching at altitude as a challenge rather than a conspiracy to ruin his numbers. Consciously or subconsciously, the pitchers who have failed here most spectacularly seemed to blame altitude, not themselves, for their issues. Belisle, by contrast, has been a better pitcher here than he was during his previous stint in Cincinnati.

This remains the essential dilemma of big-league baseball a mile high. The effects of altitude are real; any honest pitcher will tell you that. To succeed here, a pitcher has to adjust for those effects and adjust back at sea level without resorting to the defense mechanism of blaming all those changes when things go wrong. It’s a tough psychological line to walk, and it’s tougher still to predict how any particular pitcher will deal with it before he gets here. Twenty years in, the Rocks remain a long way from a solution.

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July 15, 2012

The latest Coors Field casualty

By Dave Krieger

If you happened to be among the 35,151 people who paid (or managed a ticket from someone who had) to see the Rockies play the Phillies on Saturday night, you saw the most recent version of the species of baseball player known as the Coors Field casualty.

Jeremy Guthrie has joined a small but distinguished group of pitchers (and one manager) who were driven to distraction and ultimately defeated by Coors Field, or by the altitude at which it sits. Each retreated into his own defensive bubble, refusing to acknowledge the elephant in the ballpark because they couldn’t accept their inability to overcome it.

Keep in mind Guthrie was acquired over the offseason to be the veteran leader of the pitching staff. Looking over his previous three seasons, Rockies management saw a horse who never missed a start, threw 200 or more innings every year, pitched for lousy teams in Baltimore and never complained. What they got was the opposite — a head case who can’t show leadership to the Rocks’ young pitchers because he can’t get out of his own way.

One sarcastic gesture — tipping his cap to the crowd as one of his early exits was accompanied by a symphony of boos — offered all the insight necessary into the psychological shield he has raised to protect himself from what no doubt seem like the slings and arrows of some strange and foreign planet.

Following his ninth loss in 12 decisions Saturday night, when he gave up four runs, all in the first inning, and came out in the fifth, this was Guthrie’s post-game session with the inquiring minds:

Q: So what’s your diagnosis? What happened in the first inning?

A: Just a, you know, got behind to (Carlos) Ruiz and he took a good hack and, you know, a three-run homer.

Q: That’s it? What about the hits that led up to that?

A: You know, the fastball away, 1-0 count, off the plate a little bit, (Chase Utley) did a nice job to punch in (Shane) Victorino. Victorino was a fastball up in the zone, 0-2, tried to elevate it, got it at his letters but he did a nice job and hit it into the gap. I walked (Ryan) Howard, I think it was on five pitches, got behind him. I think that’s all the hits. I think that’s all the results of the first inning.

Q: Especially after the first inning, you were able to keep it under control after that, do you feel like you have a pretty good pattern, at least here at home?

A: I think so. I mean, I’ve got the longest scoreless streak of my career at Coors, so there’s a lot of positives to build on. It’s a career low in runs allowed in a start as well. So there’s positives to build on and you’ve got to take what you can and go for it.

Q: At this point is it trying to just build on something like that, considering how it’s gone so far?

A: Yeah. You always find the positives and try to build on ’em. That’s what I try to do. That’s the kind of person I am and if it works out I’m pleased; if it doesn’t, I’ll keep that same attitude in baseball and in life.

Q: Jeremy, was it self-evident to you from the first inning what you needed to adjust or did anybody have a chat with you between the first and second?

A: No, no chat. It came down to one pitch, really. Three-one. The Utley pitch wasn’t a mistake. It was where I was trying to go. The Victorino pitch was where I was trying to throw it. The walk is not what I was trying to do. I look at it every at-bat, every pitch. You look at four runs and you just think the world’s coming to an end, but it really came down to one big pitch, to Ruiz, to one of the best hitters in the league right now.

When the brief group session was over, I asked Guthrie if I could ask him a couple of further questions, one-on-one.

“No,” he said. “Thank you.” And then he hightailed it out of the clubhouse.

Now, granted, this refusal could well be because of my personal charm. Guthrie would not be the first athlete who, given a choice, declined an opportunity to spend any more time than necessary answering my questions. But he also gave me a flashback to the most famous Coors Field casualty of the Rockies’ first 20 years, who gave me a similar response when I tried to talk to him one-on-one about pitching here.

In 2001, Mike Hampton got the biggest contract ever given to a pitcher at the time — eight years, $121 million. He’s the poster boy of Coors Field casualties. The Rockies broke the bank to sign him after coming off consecutive (pre-humidor) seasons in which their starters pitched to earned-run averages of 6.19 and 5.59, numbers that might sound familiar if you’ve followed this year’s team, whose starters are currently at 6.06.

Hampton had gone 37-12 over the previous two seasons for the Astros and Mets. He was a power sinker ball pitcher, exactly what their home launch pad seemed to demand. So the Rocks overpaid in a big way to snare the top free agent pitcher of the year.

His first start was awe-inspiring. He threw 8 1/3 innings of five-hit, shutout ball at Coors Field against the Cardinals. On June 10, when he beat the Cardinals again, he was 9-2 with a 2.98 ERA and a National League All-Star for the second time.

From there, it went downhill in a hurry. By the end of July, he had lost six of his previous seven decisions and the ERA had swelled to 4.97. His jaw tightened in post-game interviews. He retreated to formulaic answers, just as Guthrie has, reciting his pitches in a bland monotone the way a golfer recites his shots. This pitch missed, that pitch got too much of the plate. He denied any larger issues. The competitor in him would not allow him to acknowledge them, at least not publicly.

He finished the season with a record of 14-13 and an ERA of 5.41. For a pitcher who had put up ERAs of 2.90 and 3.14 the two previous seasons, it was impossible to accept. He couldn’t have suddenly forgotten how to pitch. It had to be the park. The park or the altitude; either way, this $%&* place!

By his second year, Hampton was such a mess that his road ERA exceeded his Coors Field ERA, which is not the case for Guthrie. At sea level, Guthrie has been the guy the Rocks traded for — actually a little better than the guy they traded for — pitching to an ERA of 3.67. True, he’s only 2-4, but he’s used to pitching pretty well and losing; it happened all the time with the Orioles.

But in Colorado he’s now 1-5 with an ERA of 9.23. In body language and impassive post-game postmortems, he seems to be all but shouting, Get me outta here!

For Hampton, the splits didn’t matter as much as the general deterioration. The harder he gripped the ball, the more he tried to force it to do what he wanted, the less it did. Again, this was pre-humidor, when many pitchers attributed the absence of break in their pitches to the feel of the baseball, which they said was slick as a billiard ball.

Relatively successful hurlers at Coors — the few, the proud — adjust to the reduced movement of their pitches in the less-dense air at altitude, and then adjust back when they go to sea level. By the end of his second and final season with the Rockies — he went 7-15 with a 6.15 ERA — Hampton wanted nothing but to follow Bob Seger’s advice and get out of Denver. The Rocks obliged, but the financial burden of his fully guaranteed contract — and those they took on in exchange for it — haunted them for years.

The original Coors Field casualty was Greg Harris, a breaking ball specialist, and he didn’t even pitch at Coors Field. The Rocks were playing at Mile High Stadium during their inaugural season when they traded for two Padres starters — Harris and Bruce Hurst. Harris had burst on the scene as a reliever in his early years in San Diego, his out pitch a devastating 12-to-6 curve ball.

The Padres converted him into a starter in 1991. He was 10-9 with a 3.67 ERA when the Rocks traded for him on July 26, 1993. After his arrival, he went 1-8 with a 6.50 ERA. His curve no longer broke; it just spun up to the plate with a little sign on it that said, “Hit me!”

The following season, 1994, he went 3-12 with a 6.55 ERA. When the season was over, the Rocks released him. He was 30 and he was done. The Twins gave him a shot the following year. He went 0-5, 8.82 and called it a career.

Another Coors Field casualty was not a pitcher at all. Manager Jim Leyland quit on the Rocks in 1999, walking away from the final two years of his contract. The club lost 90 games that year and Leyland decided he couldn’t manage in a place where he didn’t recognize the game.

We now add Guthrie to the list. Jason Hammel, the starter for whom he was traded, is 8-6 for the Orioles with a 3.54 ERA. Indignant fans want general manager Dan O’Dowd fired for making such a terrible trade. Of course, Hammel was 7-13 with a 4.76 ERA last season for Colorado. If you don’t think altitude has a lot to do with both Hammel’s sudden improvement and Guthrie’s sudden deterioration, you haven’t been tracking this thing as long as the Rockies have.

For most of the past 20 years, Rocks management has declined to discuss the challenges of pitching at altitude in any detail. Acknowledge it, they figure, and you’ve given your pitchers a built-in excuse if they perform poorly. This year, they have acknowledged it in perhaps the most explicit way yet, switching to a four-man starting rotation with a limited pitch count.

O’Dowd admitted to season-ticket holders that the organization still hasn’t solved the riddle of pitching here. He also told them that starters who pitch a normal workload for three years at altitude tend to suffer debilitating injuries. The limited pitch count is an effort to prevent their pitchers from destroying themselves.

On the bright side, pitching successfully here is not impossible. In the next post on this blog, a conversation with someone who’s done it.

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June 20, 2012

The Rockies’ desperate gambit

By Dave Krieger

No one can say for certain who originated the popular aphorism, “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” although it goes back at least to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, referring to people who were desperately ill.

Yup, the same dude who wrote the Hippocratic Oath, the one promising to do no harm, which is perhaps an oath baseball managers should also take, not that they can help themselves.

The Hippocratic Oath, by the way, was sworn to Apollo, Greek god of the sun. Just saying.

Perhaps the most succinct form of the sentiment comes from the Latin: “extremis malis extrema remedia.” Google Translate turns this into “the evils of the remedies,” which brings us to the Rockies.

I probably don’t need to explain why these are desperate times for the Rocks. Their starting pitching is as bad as it has ever been, going all the way back to the pre-humidor days when baseball games in the thin air a mile above sea level produced football scores and Rockies fans prayed for late field goals when Dante Bichette or Vinny Castilla came to bat with a couple of men on base.

This season’s early injury to Jhoulys Chacin, last year’s winningest starter, certainly didn’t help. Neither did the unexplained regression of rookie Drew Pomeranz, prize of the Ubaldo Jimenez trade. Nor the continued setbacks during rehabilitation from Tommy John surgery of Jorge De La Rosa, who has yet to pitch an inning of big-league ball this season after blowing out his elbow a year ago. That’s three starters the Rocks hoped to have in their rotation by now, and none of them is.

But by far the biggest disappointment has been Jeremy Guthrie, acquired over the winter in what right now looks like one of the worst trades in club history. The Rocks exchanged inconsistent starter Jason Hammel and reliever Matt Lindstrom for Guthrie. In Hammel’s most recent outing for Baltimore, he threw a one-hit, complete-game shutout over the Braves to improve his record to 7-2 and his earned-run average to 2.87.

Frankly, no screams of anguish filled my inbox when general manager Dan O’Dowd traded him following a 7-13, 4.76 campaign for the Rocks last season, but in retrospect he has become Rockies fans’ all-time favorite pitcher. This is mostly because of Guthrie, who has been, in a word, horrendous.

Following his latest horror show — according to one Twitter wag, it is now the Rockies Horror Pitching Show, derived from the old camp classic, the Rocky Horror Picture Show — Guthrie was summoned to manager Jim Tracy’s office on Tuesday in Philadelphia and informed he was being dropped from the starting rotation. A record of 3-6 and an ERA of 7.02 will often have that effect.

Rather than replace Guthrie with the next in line of the usual suspects, Tracy made a startling announcement. For the time being, the Rocks will operate with a rotation of four starters, not five, and each will be limited to about 75 pitches per start, owing to the fact that each will be pitching next on three days of rest rather than four.

This, then, is the Rockies’ desperate measure.

I texted Tracy in Philly this morning to see if he’d like to talk about it and he replied with a friendly personal note that also included this:

“Not much to say about it. As you and I have discussed in the past, we play in a very unique place and we’re just trying something different and we’ll see where it goes.”

Let me say at the outset that in the abstract, I am almost always in favor of trying something different. Baseball in particular has a tendency toward Orwell’s groupthink that I find maddening. A pitcher throws an eight-inning shutout, completely dominant, and the manager pulls him in favor of his “closer” in the ninth, who promptly blows it. I mention this only because the Cubs do it about once a week, or nearly every time Ryan Dempster pitches. But I digress.

So, in the abstract, I love the idea the Rocks are doing something that makes baseball fans everywhere scratch their heads. I mean, seriously, why not? What, exactly, do they have to lose? They already have the worst pitching in the game.

Unfortunately, decisions in baseball, like decisions in pretty much every other sphere of human activity, are not made in the abstract. They are made in the particular, the practical, the concrete, not to bring up the playing surface of the Phillies stadium that preceded the current one.

So let’s examine the particulars of the Rockies’ new plan. It has two basic elements. One is the four-man rotation, as opposed to the conventional five. The other is the 75-pitch limit, as opposed to the conventional (and mostly unspoken) 100-125, depending on the pitcher and circumstances. (The Mets’ Johan Santana was permitted to throw 134 against the Cardinals on June 1, mostly because he was throwing a no-hitter, but he had to convince his manager to let him finish.)

Baseball’s transition from the four-man to the five-man starting rotation is, frankly, a bit mysterious. It happened during my lifetime. In a remarkably short space of time, every team followed, like a troop of Pavlovian dogs.

I recall as if it were yesterday the 1971 Orioles staff. Mike Cuellar started 38 games that year. Jim Palmer and Pat Dobson started 37 apiece. Dave McNally started but 30, owing, if I recall, to an injury of some kind. They comprised the last big-league pitching staff with four 20-game winners (McNally won 21).

Cuellar finished 21 of his 38 starts. Palmer was right behind him with 20 complete games. Dobson had 18; McNally, 11. Dave Leonhard, a reliever who got six spot starts, finished one of those.

The major-league leader in starts that year was the Tigers’ Mickey Lolich, with 45. Forty years later, 2011’s leaders, eight of them, started 34 games apiece.

What happened? Have pitchers grown more feeble? While football, basketball and hockey players grow ever bigger, stronger and more athletic, are baseball players shrinking into fragile flowers? Has evolution mistaken them for ballet dancers?

Or is it just that they make way more money today and the people who run ballclubs and pay the large guaranteed salaries are scared to death of destroying their massive investments through overuse?

That’s a column for another day. Suffice it to say for now that ample historical evidence demonstrates a four-man rotation is not beyond the physical capability of the human species. If one team out of thirty wants to give it a try, I say, more power to it.

(Unfortunately, the Rockies are probably the one team out of thirty for which this experiment is least advisable, owing to the additional stress on the arm of trying to make pitches break and move with less air resistance a mile above sea level, a phenomenon to which any number of hurlers has testified over the club’s twenty-year history. Again, a subject for another day.)

It is the second element of the Rocks’ desperate measure that throws me off the track into the tumbleweeds. The central problem posed by the club’s sorry starting pitching this season has been the burden on the bullpen, which already leads the National League in innings pitched.

Ineffective starters have had to come out of games early, leaving too much of the game to be pitched by relievers, which wears them out and leaves them less effective when the Rocks are actually ahead late in a game, as rare as that is these days. Rather than solve that problem, the new strategy gilds it into club policy.

If a starter must come out after 75 pitches no matter what, even when the Rocks get that rarest of all silver moonbeams, an effective start, that rare masterpiece will have to end prematurely and the bullpen will have to be called upon, even if, for a change, it isn’t really needed.

The problem here is one of simple arithmetic. When Tracy moved Guthrie to the bullpen, he designated him one of two “long” relievers — the sort that comes into a game early when the starter comes out early. The other long man in the Rocks’ bullpen is Guillermo Moscoso.

So, when Tracy pulled starter Josh Outman on Day 1 of the experiment at 72 pitches with one out in the fifth inning, he called on Moscoso, who came on to finish the fifth and pitch the sixth, acting as a bridge to the (these days) normal bullpen innings — the seventh, eighth and (if necessary) ninth. This evening, one assumes, when Tracy pulls Alex White after 75 pitches, it will be Guthrie who serves as the bridge.

And what about tomorrow? Moscoso again? Are the two long men now sentenced to pitch multiple innings every other day? Does that sound like a good idea?

Maybe the Rocks are counting on occasionally getting a really efficient start in which 75 pitches get them into the sixth and no long man is required. But in the case of such a start, why the heck would you want to remove a guy pitching so efficiently? To follow some pre-ordained plan that makes no allowance for the common-sense notion that, Hey, this dude is pitching really well! Leave him alone!

The more pitchers you use in a game, the more likely you are to use one who is ineffective that particular day. If you have a system that guarantees you’re going to use four or five every single day, the chances at least one will blow up are pretty good.

Take Tuesday, Day 1 of the experiment. Adam Ottavino has been one of the Rockies’ best relievers this season. But he happened not to have it Tuesday. The third pitcher in, he gave up three runs in one inning of work. A 4-2 deficit became a 7-2 deficit. Game over.

The last time a baseball club decided the solution to its problems lay in a committee, it was the Cubs and their college of coaches in 1961 and ’62. The manager’s job rotated among seven coaches, every one of whom had a losing record. That will be the column’s final Cubs reference. Promise.

Common sense in baseball has always suggested this: When a pitcher is going well, leave him in there. When a pitcher is going badly, take him out. All sorts of “innovations” have worked against this simple principle. Managers routinely remove pitchers now simply because they throw with the wrong arm. A left-handed batter is coming up, therefore the right-handed reliever throwing well must come out and a left-handed reliever must come on. A pitcher throwing well must come out because his turn in the lineup is coming up (National League). And so on.

In short, the fewer arbitrary rules a team has, the more likely it is to follow common sense and allow effective pitchers to keep pitching. This should be the goal.

So, what’s the alternative for the Rocks, a team in admittedly dire straits? Well, I’m sorry to say, it’s not experimental and it’s not innovative. Sometimes the simplest solution is also the right one.

Moscoso, a 28-year-old right hander from Venezuela, started 21 games for Oakland last season, finishing with a record of 8-10 and an ERA of 3.38. When the Rocks obtained him and Outman from the A’s in exchange for Seth Smith last winter, they envisioned him as a candidate for the starting rotation. Unfortunately, Moscoso was terrible in spring training and about as bad during a brief (two starts) major-league audition. A demotion back to the minor leagues followed.

Since his return in early June, he’s been getting progressively better. Including his stint in relief of Outman on Tuesday, he has now pitched 6 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings in three relief appearances. He has earned another chance to start.

With youngsters Pomeranz and Tyler Chatwood trying to get their acts together in the minor leagues and Chacin, De La Rosa and Juan Nicasio working their way back from injuries, this need not be a permanent solution. But for now, it is the obvious one: Add Moscoso to the rotation as the fifth starter, replacing Guthrie. Trade Guthrie, a mental casualty of Coors Field, as soon as possible.

That leaves a starting rotation of White, Moscoso, Outman, Jeff Francis and Christian Friedrich. If, by some miracle, one of them pitches a really good game, Tracy can leave him in there to pitch as far as he can rather than remove him for no good reason because he’s hit an arbitrary pitch limit.

And if none of them ever does, well, the Rocks are right back to where they are now, ringing that bullpen phone too early.

I empathize with Tracy’s plight. And I admire his willingness to try something different in a league where groupthink often appears to be the only thinking going on. But sometimes, when you wrestle with a problem too long, you can just out-think yourself.

At times like those, it’s sometimes a good idea to take a break and pop in a DVD of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

“You just keep thinking, Butch,” says Sundance. “That’s what you’re good at.”

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June 10, 2012

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you

By Dave Krieger

It was probably past time for Jim Tracy to get thrown out of a game. Too bad he didn’t kick dirt over home plate or pull up first base or turn his hat around so he could go nose-to-nose with Greg Gibson. I mean, if you’re getting tossed anyway, get your money’s worth. That’s what Earl Weaver used to say.

On the precipice of a five-game losing streak, their starting pitching now in the conversation for the worst of all time, the Rockies came to bat in the bottom of the ninth Sunday trailing the Los Angeles Angels 10-7.

They got one back immediately. Tyler Colvin led off with a double to the opposite field off Scott Downs, a tough left-hander, and Marco Scutaro followed with a single to center. Colvin scored and the Rocks were within two. It was the first earned run Downs had surrendered in 24 appearances covering 20 2/3 innings this season.

Despite the sorry state of the home team, which fell to 11 games below .500 at 24-35, 37,722 fans showed up at Coors Field on a beautiful, cool afternoon, and most of them were still there. They rose to cheer a comeback that might salvage one game from the series.

Carlos Gonzalez, who had three hits, including both his 16th home run and a bunt single, drilled a shot head-high back up the middle. Downs lifted his glove, at least partly in self-defense, and the ball found it.

“He caught the ball,” Tracy said afterward.

Scutaro had started toward second and Downs realized he had a chance to double him off first. He reached into his glove even as the momentum of CarGo’s shot drove him backward. The ball fell out of his glove and hit the ground. This happens all the time at second base as pivot men try to turn the double play. The umpire calls the runner out at second, signaling that the catch was made and the ball dropped in the exchange to the throwing hand. This was not the call Gibson made.

“He called it a no catch, and I’m not going to speak any more about it,” Tracy said before speaking just a little more about it.

“I put myself in a real position to get in a heck of a lot of trouble, but personally I felt like he caught the ball. He caught the ball and was reaching for the ball because ‘Scootie’ was kind of hung out to dry. On a ball that’s hit that hard, if that ball is not caught, you see the ball hit in the glove and immediately come back out. He had possession and he was starting to fall back and he was reaching into the glove to try to take the ball and throw it to first base. That’s what I saw. That’s all I have to say about it.”

Gibson not only made the wrong call, he made it badly, failing to communicate to fans or even the runner at first base what the heck was going on. Suddenly, the Angels were picking up the ball, throwing it to second, then throwing it to first for a conventional double play while Scutaro and Gonzalez looked on in amazement.

Tracy bolted from the dugout with surprising alacrity and confronted Gibson along the first-base line, obviously stupefied. It took him maybe a minute to get tossed. The effect of the call was to leave the Rocks with two out and nobody on. Michael Cuddyer managed a two-out single, but Todd Helton’s pop out completed the Angels’ sweep (the Rocks are now 0-6 in interleague play) and extended the losing streak to five.

“You don’t want to see that, especially in the ninth inning with no outs, representing the tie run at the plate and having Cuddyer on deck and Todd,” CarGo said. “It’s frustrating. It’s even more frustrating than everything else.

“He caught the ball. It’s amazing he caught that ball. It was even harder for me to see the ball coming off the bat and I’m sure the pitcher didn’t see the ball well. And the umpire didn’t see it at all. I guess the first thing he saw was when (Downs) was doing the turn to throw the ball to first base and as soon as (Gibson) saw the ball on the ground, he called it was no catch. But I watched the replay.

“I hit the ball, I saw he caught the ball, I shut it down, and then I was looking to first base when the umpire was calling no catch. So I turn around because I was confused, I didn’t know who was going to make the call, and I didn’t see the umpire because his hand was already down. He was just standing out there. Confusion. They throw the ball to second and they throw the ball to first. There was no chance for me to get to first base. It was tough. I think it was the wrong call because he caught the ball.

“It’s a different situation, man on first, one out. With one out, we still have a chance. With two outs, you have to create a situation again. Cuddyer did a great job getting on base and it’s a tough lefty for a lefty. That’s why Todd didn’t come through and hit the ball up to third base.

“I was in shock. First I was surprised that he caught the ball. I was more surprised that he called it a double play. I leave everything to the manager. He did anything possible to make a change. What can I do about it? I just walked back to the dugout. I knew I was out because he caught the ball, but not a double play.”

This has nothing to do with the team’s basic problem, of course. The Rocks put up 13 hits and scored eight runs. Christian Friedrich lasted four innings, which was longer than three Rockies starters in the last four games, surrendering nine runs, eight of them earned, and 10 hits. The day before, Jeff Francis surrendered eight runs in 3 1/3 innings. The starting pitching is just stunningly bad.

“I actually felt great,” said Friedrich, who now carries an earned-run average of 1.80 in four road starts and 12.60 in three starts at Coors Field. “I felt better than the last start. We had a good plan, I just didn’t execute the pitches.”

The position players don’t want to hear that any more than you do, although you do feel a little sorry for Friedrich, a rookie, taking the weight for veteran pitchers who have spit the bit.

“Offensively, we did a great job,” CarGo said. “It was a bad day again for the pitchers. To score 10 runs is a lot of pressure for us, but we did everything possible. We did everything we can. We just fell short again.”

Gibson’s bad call killed the Rockies’ final hope for a comeback. The umpires were escorted off the field to a symphonic catcall chorus from the faithful.

But, hey, Gibson’s screw-up did have one redeeming quality: For one day, it gave the Rocks someone to be mad at other than themselves.

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June 9, 2012

Sure you can go home again, but you might get hammered when you do

By Dave Krieger

Desperate for starting pitching, the Rockies fired up the flux capacitor and reached into the past, snatching Jeff Francis off the major league scrap heap and sending him out to face Albert Pujols and the Los Angeles Angels at Coors Field on Saturday.

Three and a third innings later, the Rockies’ first-round draft pick a decade ago had given up eight runs on 10 hits and much of the air had gone out of the sentimental story.

“It didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, but it certainly felt good to be back out there and back in here,” Francis said afterward. “I know I’ve got a lot more than that to offer this team so I’m going to continue to work hard and bounce back from it.”

Manager Jim Tracy promised earlier in the day that Francis would get more than one spot start as the Rocks await the return of Juan Nicasio from the disabled list.

“I’ve written his name down a couple times, as a matter of fact,” Tracy said a couple of hours before Saturday’s 11-5 loss, his team’s fourth in a row. “We’ll see where it takes us, but I’m not a believer that you give a guy one start and then say, ‘That’s it, that’s not good enough, that’s not going to work, that’s not what we’re looking for, we’re moving on to yet another guy.’ You’ve got to give this guy some opportunity.”

After Francis’ abbreviated outing, the third time in the last four games the Rocks’ starter failed to survive the fourth inning, Tracy kept his post-mortem brief.

“I don’t want to judge him too much the first time out. I don’t want to get real involved in analyzing and/or feeling like I’m overanalyzing Jeff. Just like anybody else, that’s his first time after what he had been doing at Triple-A with the Reds. Let’s let him take another start. He threw strikes like he always does. They certainly didn’t pound him. I believe they hit all singles with the exception of Pujols’ home run (off Guillermo Moscoso). Let’s get him his time off and get him back out there, let him have another start and see where we go from there.

“And Jeff realizes this, the important thing is he pitches ahead and gets ahead of hitters and doesn’t put himself in a position where he has to use a bunch of the plate, because I don’t think that’s going to work out too well for him or anybody else. But I think we’ll stop right there and just let him go back out there a second time and see where it goes from there.”

According to the Coors Field radar gun, Francis threw his fastball between 85 and 89 miles an hour, his change-up in the high 70s and his big, looping curve ball in the high 60s. I mentioned I didn’t recall the curve getting down into the 60s before. He smiled and suggested altitude might have something to do with that.

“It’s something I do take off a bit,” he said. “It’s a pitch that you come here and you’ve got to make some adjustments with it.”

The ninth overall pick of the 2002 draft, Francis had double-digit wins for the Rocks in 2005, 2006 and 2007, winning 44 games over that span, including 17 in ’07, when he also won two playoff games before losing Game 1 of the World Series.

When he returned in 2008 he had soreness in his pitching shoulder. He tried to pitch through it, finishing a disappointing 4-10. When the pain returned in spring training of 2009, he shut it down and submitted to surgical repair. His recovery wiped out his 2009 season and delayed his 2010 return until mid-May.

He finished 2010 with a record of 4-6, an earned-run average of 5.00 and his former velocity — in the low ’90s — a distant memory. He’d never been a power pitcher, but now he was dangerously close to having to rely entirely on guile.

Eligible for free agency and coming off a year in which he’d earned $5.7 million, the Rockies decided to let the market determine his value. He signed a one-year deal for $2 million with the Kansas City Royals, where he went 6-16 with a 4.82 ERA.

When no big league club summoned him this year, Francis signed a minor league deal with Cincinnati. He pitched creditably, if not spectacularly, for the Triple-A Louisville Bats, going 3-6 with a 3.72 ERA. His 77 1/3 innings led the club. After throwing a complete game shutout over the Durham Bulls last Sunday (June 3), Francis exercised his option to get out of his deal. He said Saturday he had no assurances from the Rockies when he made that decision.

“I just took a risk hoping there’d be a job out there for me somewhere, and fortunately there was,” he said.

When the Rockies called, he didn’t hesitate, despite knowing better than most the effect that pitching at altitude can have on a hurler’s statistics. Having pitched most of his career in Colorado, Francis has a mediocre career ERA of 4.78.

“I wasn’t going to wait around,” he said. “The Rockies wanted me to play here. I wasn’t going to turn it down. I loved playing here when I was here and I’d love to help this team win again. I can’t imagine anything better than winning in this town. So when the opportunity came up, I jumped on it.”

Now, of course, the question is whether the post-surgical Francis, at 31, can help.

“I really do the things that I’ve always done as a pitcher,” he said. “I don’t really think I’ve changed a lot. Since the surgery I’ve really tried to get back to the pitcher I was and the pitcher I am. To me, there’s only one way I know how to throw, and that’s what you see out there. The velocity has never come all the way back, but it’s creeping, it’s creeping. It’s more than it was at this time last year. So there’s things that I continue to do to stay strong and to stay healthy.”

While it’s true Francis didn’t give up any extra-base hits Saturday, he gave up a lot of sharp singles, 10 in 3 1/3 innings, including five in the second inning alone.

“Obviously, I gave up a lot of hits, but I don’t feel like I was hit around hard,” he said. “A couple of balls that could have gone a different way could have turned around some innings for me, but they didn’t, and I wasn’t able to recover from it. I’d make a mistake here and there and they’d take advantage of it. Next thing you know, it’s eight runs later.”

The Rocks are desperate enough for starting pitching to give Francis a longer leash, but they do have an in-house alternative in Moscoso, who is currently the long man in the bullpen but was a starter last season for Oakland. Moscoso wasn’t great in relief of Francis, giving up two runs on four hits in 2 2/3 innings, but he was better than Francis. Of course, Moscoso had chances to earn a spot in the rotation, both in spring training and early in the season, and failed to take advantage.

To make room for Francis on the roster, the Rockies finally threw in the towel on talented but maddening Esmil Rogers, designating him for assignment. Rogers has great stuff, often hitting 96 with his fastball, but his mental focus comes and goes. The last straw came Friday night, when Tracy brought him in to pitch the top of the ninth against the Angels.

“You’re trailing 4-1,” Tracy said. “We need three outs. He gets two outs on five pitches and 18 pitches later I have to walk out there and get him. And we’ve got to warm another guy up and bring another guy in. You just start running out of opportunities to do that because the club doesn’t respond to it too well, either, let’s be honest about it, when they see him walk out there. That’s where we’re at.”

The Angels scored three in the ninth off Rogers and won going away, 7-2. Tracy said the Rockies would be happy to take Rogers back if he clears waivers, but with his arm, someone seems likely to put in a claim.

The Rocks have now slipped back to 10 games below .500 at 24-34. Most of the good feeling from their recent 6-1 homestand has disappeared. Their starting rotation could qualify as a federal disaster area. They can’t expect their results to change until that does.

“The thing that I have to say simply boils down to this,” Tracy said following Saturday’s loss. “Much like we were dealing with in the month of May, over the course of three out of the last four days we pitched a total of 9 2/3 starter innings, and that’s not going to work. It’s just simply not going to work.”

Those would be Josh Outman (3 innings), Jeremy Guthrie (3 1/3) and Francis (3 1/3). The only bright spot was six innings from Alex White, who made two mistakes to Torii Hunter, which were enough to beat an offense that scored three runs in three games before Saturday, when it produced five home runs, all of them solo shots. It was the second game this season in which the Rocks hit five home runs. They lost both.

Whether Francis can help turn around the worst starting pitching in the National League will determine whether his return to Colorado is more than a forgettable curtain call.

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June 9, 2012

Tulo: I’m not changing positions

By Dave Krieger

Troy Tulowitzki had just finished a light workout, doing some straight-line running and taking a few ground balls before Saturday’s game at Coors Field.

“Nothing off the bat; just stuff that was being thrown at me,” he said, stopping to take a few questions on his way back to the clubhouse. “It was the most I’ve done and I definitely felt good.”

Tulo went on the disabled list May 31 after pulling a groin muscle getting out of the batter’s box the previous night.

“At the end of the day, there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said. “I prepare myself every day to try to take the field and I couldn’t this last week that I’ve missed and there’s nothing you can do about that. You can’t beat yourself up. You have to look forward to coming back and make up for lost time and not try to do too much and try to help the team win games.”

I mentioned that after a slow start he was just heating up with the bat when he was injured.

“There’s no doubt I was starting to swing the bat a little bit better, but I came off DL stints before where I’ve got right back in it and helped the team win games,” he said.

I asked if he’s thought of pursuing any unconventional training techniques to stay loose — yoga, for example.

Tulo is built more like a tight end than a shortstop and has had periodic issues with leg muscles. Last July, he strained a quad running to first base, missing four days. He strained a quad in May 2010 and missed three days. In 2008, he missed 46 games with a tear of the quadriceps ligament. And he missed a month in the minors with a strained quad shortly after the Rockies made him the seventh overall pick of the 2005 draft.

“No, I think if there was any magical thing out there, there would be a lot — there’s a lot of guys hurt,” Tulowitzki said. “I just try to stay up on top of things, but with how demanding the middle of the diamond is, from center field to second base, shortstop, catcher, those guys, how demanding the game is on them, it’s tough, and a lot of guys seem to get injured.”

Well, he brought it up. Do those demands in the middle of the diamond tempt him to move to a corner position, where you’ll find most cleanup hitters?

“No, not at all,” he said. “That’s come up since I went on this DL and it’s a little bit frustrating. I don’t think I’ve seen a shortstop win a gold glove and it being talked about moving to third base. I did it coming out of the box, nothing to do really with defense. I’m going to play just as hard at third as short. I understand there’s a little bit more movement, but I don’t think that’s an answer at all.”

Would more days off help?

“It’s so easy to say, and people say that in spring training, but we’re sitting here, what, 12 games out of first place?” he said. “It doesn’t really look too good if you take a day off. Now, if you’re running away with it a little bit and you’re in the lead in the division, it’s a lot easier to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to take a day here and there.’ But with the spot that we’re in, it’s going to be hard to say, ‘Oh, I’m going to take a day.’ Now, if I am hurting, I have to be honest with them, but it’s going to be tough when I do come back to get out of there.”

By my count, he’ll be eligible to come off the 15-day DL on Thursday, but that doesn’t mean he’ll be ready. What does he have to be able to do?

“The hard cuts around the bases,” he said. “Out of the box, obviously, that’s how I got hurt so that’s going to be in my mind a little bit, is that first step out of the box. Once I get over some of those obstacles I think mentally I’ll be in a better spot.”

Is a rehab assignment likely before he returns to the Rocks?

“I would think so,” he said. “Two, three days maybe. I don’t know where, but I think if I pass the test the next couple of days, then we can kind of set that up.”

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June 5, 2012

A first for Peyton Manning

By Dave Krieger

Everybody knows that Todd Helton used to play football, preceding Peyton Manning as the quarterback for the University of Tennessee Volunteers.

What you may not know is Manning used to play baseball. He was the shortstop at Isidore Newman School, the private high school he attended in New Orleans. But as he told the story Monday on the Dave Logan Show, even baseball became a way to get in extra football practice.

“All my receivers played baseball, so we’d go play baseball and then we’d keep our spikes on and go back to the school after the game and throw pass routes,” Manning said. “So it was a good transition from baseball to football.”

Watching his old friend Helton and the Rockies play at Coors Field has been one of the few diversions Manning has allowed himself during his intensive work at Dove Valley to get ready for the Broncos season. He attended Sunday’s series finale against the Dodgers — a 3-2 Rockies win — and hung out with Helton for a bit in the clubhouse afterward.

“It’s been a lot of fun being in the same city with Todd,” Manning said. “He’s always supported me in a big way and I’ve been a huge fan of him. It’s kind of fun that he and I played at Tennessee together and we’re still kind of hanging around. I’m hoping the Rockies get on a little run here. I think they’re playing good as of late. Hopefully they can get Arizona and come back and get Anaheim this weekend.”

Hanging out in the Rockies clubhouse gave Manning an insight into the vast difference between preparing for 162 games a year, as the Rocks do, and preparing for 16, as the Broncos do.

“I will tell you one thing I am envious about,” he said. “That locker room in baseball, it’s so laid back. It has to be. I mean, 162 games. In football, if you smile before the game you get in trouble because you’re not focused. And there’s something to it. Obviously, they want to win, but it is a different atmosphere when it comes to that.”

Manning admitted to a little impatience with the strict rules in the new collective bargaining agreement governing practice time. Joining a new team, learning a new system and practicing with new teammates, he’d like all the practice time he can get.

“I’ve enjoyed the increased activities we’ve been allowed to do,” he said in the midst of the Broncos’ third set of organized team activities (OTAs). “I really haven’t left since I signed here back in March. At first, we weren’t even allowed to throw at the facility. We could only lift weights here. Then we could throw here with just players, no coaches. And then coaches could come on the field. And now, finally, we’re in these OTAs where we can go against the defense. We’ve got jerseys, we’ve got helmets, it feels like a football practice in a normal football environment.

“I think we’re getting good work done. We’re learning a lot, just trying to improve every day. So it’s been part of the process for me, but I’ve enjoyed being around the guys and getting to know them as people, but also getting to know them on the field as football players and timing and just getting comfortable.”

Following up on his mention of timing, I asked if he had any idea how long it might take to develop the sort of chemistry with his new receivers that he famously enjoyed with pass catchers such as Marvin Harrison, Reggie Wayne and Dallas Clark in Indianapolis for 13 seasons.

“It’s hard to give a date,” he said. “That certainly is something that we’re shooting for. Believe me, I’d like to have it down perfectly by tomorrow. Every time we throw an incompletion in practice, it’s not something that I want. I want to complete every single pass in practice. The only way I do know to get that timing is to push the comfort level out here in practice. To attempt passes, to try things. We’re getting great work going against some great guys in our secondary.

“It’s not something that happens overnight, but it is something that you can try to make happen overnight by just taking advantage of every repetition and every opportunity to meet, and after practice on your own. I threw some with (Demaryius) Thomas today after practice, trying to kind of grab a different guy to get some work.

“It’s hard to say when you can have it. I think one thing I’ve really tried to do is just not play any kind of comparisons to my years in Indy as far as receivers. It’s a different time and we’ve got different guys and we’re continuing to work to try to get our timing down. It’s a challenge that I look forward to trying to beat.”

Even after 13 years in the NFL, Manning said Denver reporters asked him a question after Monday’s workout he had never gotten before.

“People are passionate about their football,” he said. “I’m not going to lie, I had an all-time first today. I was being asked about some incompletions that we threw in practice. That’s just never happened to me before. That’s kind of like asking Todd why he didn’t hit more home runs in batting practice.”

Nevertheless, Manning found himself explaining why he might throw to a covered receiver in practice when someone else was open.

“In practice, we are working on certain things,” he said. “There are times when coach (Mike) McCoy will tell me, ‘Hey, I want you throw it to this guy no matter what. I want you to force this play in no matter what the defense does.’

“So you work on these things in practices. I can assure you I have no idea what my all-time statistics are in practice. That’s not a statistic anybody really wants to keep up with.”

For now, the Broncos are still installing plays, the first stage of getting a new offense down.

“You’re putting in new plays during this time and you’re running these plays for the first time against the defense,” Manning said. “You get to run them one time and you’d like to run it again and they say, ‘No, there’s another new play we have to run next.’

“So it is hard in these OTAs to master a play. That’s what I like about minicamp and especially in training camp, we’ll be able to repeat some of these plays that we put in and really try to get comfortable in learning everything about the play. Because really, to learn everything about a play, you really have to rep it a number of times. With the new rules and the limited amount of time you’re allowed on the practice field, there is a challenge in that. But it’s one that we’ll be able to still maneuver around.”

Between mastering the new playbook, his continuing injury rehab and acclimating himself to a new environment and new teammates, Manning hasn’t taken a lot of time off to check out the city or the state. He is a notorious workaholic, which may explain his four NFL most valuable player awards. But what he’s seen so far of the Broncos’ fan base confirms the impressions he formed as a visiting player.

“I really wish I had more time to experience it more,” he said. “People do ask me, ‘How do you like Denver?’ and I really can’t honestly tell them that I’ve had a chance to do some things that I want to do because I have spent so much time over here. The Rockies games have been the one little getaway that I have and I have been to a couple of benefits. I really don’t know it as well as I’d like to know it.

“All I can tell you is the people just couldn’t be any friendlier. There’s a great sense of hospitality here from the people. People really love this city. One thing I have learned is I’ve met a lot of people who really aren’t from here originally but moved here at different points in their lives. Take John Lynch, take Brandon Stokley, some other non-athletes that live here, and just how much they fell in love with it once they moved here. So I think that speaks a lot about the city and the people.

“From the football standpoint, I can just tell from the times that I’ve played out here how passionate these people are about their football. That’s the kind of environment that you want to play in as an athlete. Denver’s always had that passion and I’m hoping I can do my part and be a part of it. That’s why I’m working so hard, so hopefully we can give these fans something to cheer about.”

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June 3, 2012

Tracy: Rockies have been through ‘living hell’

By Dave Krieger

So we’re hanging in the Rockies’ dugout with manager Jim Tracy before Sunday’s finale of the Dodgers series at Coors Field and I ask him what he’s looking for out of rookie pitcher Alex White, who is scheduled to take the mound a couple of hours later.

“I don’t know why I’m going to tell you this, OK?” Tracy says. “There’s a part of my gut that says to me that we are going to see the best game that we’ve seen from Alex White since he put a Rockies uniform on . . . . He may make a liar out of me. I really hope he doesn’t.”

About five hours later, after White had thrown 6 2/3 innings of two-hit ball to lead the Rocks to a 3-2 victory and a 6-1 homestand, Tracy met with the media wretches once more.

“Nostradamus,” I inquired, “do you have any other predictions for us?”

“I don’t have any more for you,” Tracy said, smiling. “Stay tuned.”

He had seen this coming in the early innings of a couple of White’s recent starts. But then somebody hit a pitch that got too much of the plate and White began nibbling, pitching away from contact, and everything came apart.

“Look, there’s something that leads to a gut feeling,” Tracy said. “His last couple of outings, we saw very similar in the early part of the game that we saw for 6 2/3 innings today with both the two- and the four-seam fastball. Today, he just kept coming after people. That’s why I had the gut. I saw very similar today in previous starts, I just didn’t see it long enough. Today he was after the bat all day long.”

During an 18-day stretch from May 4 to May 22, the Rocks went from hopeful to battered as their starting pitching dissolved. They lost 15 of 18 games, falling from 12-12 to 15-27. Angry fans peppered radio talk shows with demands and invective. Fire somebody. Trade somebody. Do something.

You don’t climb out of a hole that size in a week or two. The Rocks remain seven games below .500 at 23-30 as they head out for a brief trip to Arizona before returning to Coors Field this weekend to resume interleague play. Winning six out of seven at home, including two of three against the division-leading Dodgers, restored the morale of the clubhouse. But the strong performance from a starting pitcher was the main tonic, reminding them how good they could be if they weren’t constantly scrambling to make up for the worst starting pitching in the league, as they have been most of the season so far.

“He threw the ball better than we’ve ever seen him throw,” Todd Helton said of White, one of three young pitchers obtained from Cleveland in the Ubaldo Jimenez trade last summer. “He pitched inside very effectively. A lot of guys were taking some bad swings on some fastballs. It’s good to see.”

Coors Field has been playing a lot like its pre-humidor days in the first two months of the season, but it’s been hard to tell whether that was meteorology or lousy pitching. White and Dodgers starter Nathan Eovaldi made it look like the latter, putting on a good old-fashioned pitchers’ duel before 35,353 fans on a hot Sunday afternoon that seemed made for the long ball.

White had a one-hit shutout through six, the only blemish a solid single to left by Jerry Hairston in the fourth. In the seventh, he gave up a walk to James Loney and a two-run homer down the left field line to A.J. Ellis on a two-seam fastball. Tracy tried to nurse him through the inning, but when he walked Adam Kennedy with two out, Tracy took the ball, his club clinging to a 3-2 lead.

“I think I just lost a little bit of the strike zone there for a minute, but I felt good,” White said. “I don’t know how many I threw, but I felt just as good late as I did early.”

White threw 103 pitches, 58 of them strikes. He walked five and struck out two. He induced 13 ground balls, many of them jam shots off his four-seam fastball.

“I think it was a lot of things coming together — mentally, physically, being able to make a few adjustments to command my fastball like I did,” he said. “I really felt like that was coming, coming into the start. It did come together and I felt good the whole game.”

From the bullpen, which leads the National League in innings pitched and covered 16 1/3 of the 18 innings in the first two games of the series, it looked pretty good.

“We were really proud,” said Matt Belisle, the workhorse of the staff who made his 27th appearance in the team’s 53rd game, working 1 1/3 perfect innings to deliver the game to closer Rafael Betancourt.

“We needed it. I think it showed some of (White’s) grit and determination to just fill up the zone and let these guys hit themselves out and not try to be too picky. We were very proud and he came up big.”

Tracy initially called on southpaw Rex Brothers to face left-handed hitting Dodgers shortstop Dee Gordon. But when Gordon reached on an infield bleeder, Tracy summoned Belisle to face pinch-hitter Alex Castellanos. With runners on first and second and two out, a hit would tie the game and leave White with nothing to show for his best effort as a big leaguer.

Castellanos ripped the ball on the ground toward right-center field.

“He squared up a slider pretty good and I looked back and all I see is No. 9 on a hard backhand,” Belisle said.

Rookie second baseman D.J. LeMahieu, obtained last winter from the Cubs in the Ian Stewart trade and forced into action by Troy Tulowitzki’s groin injury, speared it on a short hop.

“It was the right spot at the right time and it felt good to come through for the team like that,” the freckle-faced 23-year-old said. “The ball was hit so hard, it was kind of a reaction.”

Like his teammates in the dugout, Belisle exulted on the field.

“I think it was a great job to put it in the mitt, but to gather himself and turn and make an accurate throw was even better,” he said. “It was a huge play in a huge situation and I’m really proud for him and for the club. That’s a great play for a rookie who’s been up for a little bit.”

LeMahieu received a hero’s welcome in a dugout desperate for a turning point.

“Noisy in our dugout,” Tracy said. “Every guy up on the rail. They couldn’t wait for him to get into the dugout, embrace him, hug him, give him a high-five.”

Betancourt finished it, but not before a couple of close calls. Bidding for his second jack of the game, Ellis drove Carlos Gonzalez to the left field wall with a ninth-inning fly ball. Tony Gwynn Jr. drove Michael Cuddyer to the warning track with the game’s final out.

“Here in Denver, you never know,” the veteran closer said with a smile.

Did the homestand change anything? There’s no way to know yet. The Rocks will have to keep it going and climb back above .500 to restore the faith of those who lost it during the May misery. But at least there’s a glimmer of hope now.

“I think it goes without saying that we went through about a 17-day period of living hell,” Tracy said. “That’s what we went through. And we didn’t waiver, we didn’t falter, we didn’t point fingers, we didn’t make excuses. We just kept plowing. Who’s to say how this is going to turn out, but as we go along this may be something we’ll look back on and say, one of the reasons why we became a good ballclub is because when we were seriously challenged from an adversity standpoint, we stood up to it.”

“I think it brought us closer,” said Belisle. “During the real trough of so many losses, we held together. I think everybody who’s been here knows that this team’s extremely capable of some really hot streaks, but that we have to act out what we preach as far as coming to the park every day with the same preparation, attitude and focus, despite the outcome of the game. And I think during the losses, we did that really well. So now that they’re starting to turn, we’re not getting too high, we’re just continuing to do what we know we have to, and that’s be the same with our preparation.”

Added Helton: “Every year when you go through a bad stretch you realize what it takes going out every day, grinding, doing the little things that it takes to win. I think every team goes through that. We’ve still got a ways to go. We dug ourselves a hole, but we’re playing better baseball right now.”

Tracy saw this one coming. If the other young pitchers can follow White’s lead, he may see some more.

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June 2, 2012

Curse of the short starts continues

By Dave Krieger

If these starts get any shorter, they’re going to have to come up with another name for them. Maybe mini-starts, in the spirit of miniskirts and minicomputers.

For example, the relief pitcher who started Friday’s game for the Rockies actually went deeper than the starter who began Saturday’s, although that’s not saying much.

The Rocks were already leading the National League in innings pitched by a bullpen, so they didn’t really need a freak injury to a starting pitcher one day after pitching a game by committee. But that’s what happened.

Juan Nicasio strained his left knee trying to field Elian Herrera’s single up the middle with two out in the second inning Saturday. He had to come out, leaving the bullpen to add 7 1/3 innings to the nine it pitched Friday and the league-leading 173 1/3 it had pitched through 51 games coming in. In fact, that total didn’t include Josh Outman’s 3 1/3 Friday, since he was technically a starter for a day.

“There it is and you’ve got to deal with it again,” manager Jim Tracy said. “It’s not something that you dwell a whole lot about. I think the dwelling part comes afterwards. You sit down at your desk and you start thinking about tomorrow already and where are things going to go and how will you handle it if it doesn’t present itself in the way that you want it to.

“But we’re hopeful that Alex White goes out there (Sunday) and pitches the best game he’s pitched since he put a Rockies uniform on, because I personally feel he’s getting closer to doing that. We’ll see what happens, but I’m very hopeful that we get a very solid start from Alex White tomorrow and he gives us a chance to win the series.”

The Rocks made pitching largely irrelevant by scoring 53 runs in the first five games of the current homestand, winning all five and pulling within seven games of .500. Saturday, the Dodgers’ Aaron Harang baffled them, giving up one run in six innings, so Nicasio’s short start doomed them.

Carlos Gonzalez, who had driven in 11 runs over his previous six games, came up with the bases loaded and one out in the fifth, lifted a harmless foul pop fly to Herrera off the third base line and slammed his bat to the ground in disgust. When Michael Cuddyer followed with a ground ball to second, the Rocks’ best opportunity was gone in a game they ended up losing 6-2.

“It was just frustration of the moment,” said Gonzalez, who leads the Rocks in pretty much every offensive category. “It was a pitch out of the strike zone. Obviously I make a wrong swing. I should have taken that pitch and taken it to a deeper count and just wait for my pitch and when it shows up, put a good barrel on it. But I did the opposite thing in that situation.”

Friday, the Rocks won the series opener against the National League West leaders by pounding Dodgers pitching for 13 runs. But they pitched the entire game out of the bullpen after releasing 49-year-old Jamie Moyer earlier in the week. They used Outman, Carlos Torres, Adam Ottavino, Matt Belisle and Esmil Rogers.

Saturday, they sent Torres down and recalled Rex Brothers, which gave them one more fresh arm. When Nicasio departed, Tracy went to Josh Roenicke, Matt Reynolds, Brothers and Rogers again. Roenicke, Reynolds and Brothers each pitched at least two innings, so they are probably unavailable today, barring an emergency. The club would also probably like to avoid calling on Rogers, who has pitched two days in a row.

“You come in here tomorrow morning and you sit down with your pitching people and we try to sort out who’s available and who’s not available,” Tracy said. “You don’t like to have too many days like that, but tomorrow morning will be one of those mornings.”

Nicasio said he wants to make his next start, but Tracy said the club would know more about his condition Sunday. As Nicasio left the clubhouse Saturday, he was limping noticeably.

“Seeing Nicasio only pitching one inning is not going to help a lot,” CarGo said. “But injuries are a part of the game, so all we can do is just hope he can get better and just get him back soon.”

The Rocks can still take the series and make it six out of seven on the homestand by winning today. But after consecutive starts of 3 1/3 and 1 2/3 innings, they’ll need White to give them more than a mini-start.

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May 30, 2012

Dan O’Dowd unplugged

By Dave Krieger

Whether things are going well, badly or somewhere in between, I try to touch base with Rockies general manager Dan O’Dowd at roughly the one-third and two-thirds marks of each season to take his pulse on the team. I’ve known O’Dowd for more than a decade now, and whether I was at the Rocky Mountain News, the Denver Post or 850 KOA, he’s always accommodated these requests for his time.

The one-third mark, the Rockies’ 54th game, falls on June 4 this year, which also happens to be the first day of the baseball draft, so I hit him up a few days early and we spoke this morning.

The state of the Rockies is no secret. They rank third in the National League in runs, second in home runs and second in OPS, which is the sum of on-base percentage and slugging percentage (the acronym stands for On-base Plus Slugging). They’re a good offensive club with a chance to be better than that, although their situational hitting has at times left something to be desired.

They rank last in the league in earned-run average (5.18), more than three-quarters of a run higher than the next-worst team. The combined ERA of their starters (5.80) is more than a run higher than the next-worst starting staff. On the bright side, their overworked bullpen has a better ERA (4.20) than those of four other NL teams, suggesting it might actually be pretty good if the starters did their jobs.

The Rocks have 15 quality starts (a starter throws at least six innings and gives up three earned runs or fewer) out of 48 games, the fewest in baseball. They are the only team in baseball not to have shut out an opponent all season. In 48 tries, they do not have a complete game by a starting pitcher. They lead baseball in blown saves with 11.

In short, their pitching has been frightful. And that’s chiefly why they go into tonight’s home game against Houston 10 games below .500 at 19-29.

They stand fourth in the NL West, 12.5 games behind the Dodgers, who have the best record in baseball. They have a chance to attack that deficit this weekend when L.A. makes its second trip of the season to Coors Field. The Rocks took two of three from the Dodgers on the first visit, April 30-May 2, but that seems like a long time ago, perhaps because it immediately preceded the Atlanta series in which everything fell apart.

The Rocks were 11-11 in April. So far, they are 8-18 in May. Two of their starting pitchers, Jhoulys Chacin and Jeremy Guthrie, have spent time on the disabled list. Chacin is still there. Another, Jorge De La Rosa, has been on the DL since last summer, when he underwent Tommy John surgery. He is currently making rehab starts at Triple-A Colorado Springs. A fourth starter, Drew Pomeranz, was demoted to the Springs to work on his mechanics and get his velocity back. At the moment, the starting staff consists of Guthrie, 49-year-old Jamie Moyer and three rookies — Christian Friedrich, Juan Nicasio and Alex White.

I began by asking O’Dowd an open-ended question about his evaluation of the first two months of the season.

“Honestly, a couple things,” he said. “Leaving spring training, I thought a lot of things would have to go right from a pitching standpoint for us to get out of the gate real well. I had hoped that we could play .500 or close to for the first two, three months of the season until our young pitching began to mature. Obviously, that happened in the month of April. Obviously, a lot of things have gone wrong in the month of May.

“I would say, looking at it objectively, I like our position-player club a ton. I think it’s probably one of the better position-player clubs we’ve ever put on a field because of its depth and versatility and the quality of the players. I think (Wilin) Rosario, (Jordan) Pacheco, (Tyler) Colvin, (Eric) Young give us a really nice blend of youth to go with our veterans. I think CarGo and Tulo are going to end up having monster years. I think (Michael) Cuddyer has been a solid addition. So I think that’s played out even better than I could have hoped for.

“But our starting pitching has been so bad at times that it’s really exposed our bullpen. I think if we got any kind of starting pitching, our bullpen would actually be one of the strengths of our club.

“I banked on some things which, obviously, I’m accountable for, with Guthrie and Chacin and hoping De La Rosa would get back around this time of year, this week or next. Guthrie’s been bad and Chacin got hurt and De La Rosa’s probably still four or five starts away from helping us. So we’re in a tough box relying on a lot of kids right now that have ability, but it looks like there’s just a significant gap between their potential and their performance right now.”

I asked him for a diagnosis on Guthrie, acquired from Baltimore in February in exchange for starter Jason Hammel and reliever Matt Lindstrom. Over his previous three seasons, Guthrie threw 617 1/3 innings for the Orioles with an ERA of 4.39. So far this season, he’s thrown just 40 2/3 for the Rocks, missing a handful of starts because of a freak bicycle accident, with an ERA of 5.31. On the road, he’s 2-1 with a 2.22 ERA. At Coors Field, he’s 0-2 with a 9.92 ERA.

(Full disclosure: I’ve followed the Orioles for years and admired Guthrie as a horse who took the ball every fifth day for a team that was truly awful for most of his stay. I wholeheartedly endorsed this trade.)

“I don’t know,” O’Dowd said. “I know I’m supposed to have all the answers. I went back over our process with this one. I know Jason Hammel’s pitched well, but I’ve got a long list of Coors Field bounce-backs, so that doesn’t surprise me. Guys leave here and they pitch much better than they pitched here.

“Four years of 200-plus innings, pitching in the American League East, actually getting his brains beat in at times, you’d think that would prepare him for the gauntlet that he’d go through here at times. I think the freakish injury certainly didn’t help. He’s three starts back from that now.

“He hasn’t even looked close to being the pitcher that we scouted over a long period of time. That one’s been a little perplexing to me to be frank with you, especially the lack of strike throwing. He’s always been a guy that threw strikes and pitched innings. Both he and Chacin, I thought that we’d have guys that would have 4.5 to 4.8 ERAs, but I thought we’d get 200 innings out of each of them, which would then take some pressure off the group of young starters that would end up stepping forward, and, again, hoping that De La Rosa would come back.

“So we’ve got to tread some water here and make up some ground because I think with the starting pitching, if we can just be serviceable — I mean, we’re going to go through some moments when we struggle offensively, too, but I think for the most part it’s a club that’s going to put up some runs.”

I mentioned that Guillermo Moscoso, obtained in January from Oakland along with left-hander Josh Outman in exchange for outfielder Seth Smith, had a similar disconnect, going from very reasonable numbers as a starter with the A’s (8-10, 3.38 ERA in 21 starts in 2011) to horrendous numbers before being sent down by the Rocks (0-1, 11.57).

Prior to the installation of the humidor at Coors Field in 2002, the Rockies’ ERA at home averaged more than a full run higher than their ERA on the road. Since the humidor was installed, that differential has come down to less than half a run. This year, it is back up over a run a game. The Rocks’ ERA at Coors is 5.71. On the road, it is 4.55.

So I asked O’Dowd if the park might be having an outsized effect on the numbers of pitchers coming from other places.

“For some reason, this year it’s playing much differently,” he said. “I wish I knew the answer for that. Quite honestly, when the schedule came out and I saw two nine-game home stands to open up the season, I was concerned. We’ve never had that.

“Sometimes, with particular weather patterns, you can survive that. But I was concerned about the length of those home stands. Honestly, we were doing fine up until those two Atlanta games (May 4-5) and we have not played well since then. We’ve played better this last week, but starting on that Friday night against Atlanta when we had that six-run lead and coughed it up and then we did the same thing again on Saturday, we really have never recovered from a pitching standpoint.

“If you remember the way the ballpark used to play, where pitchers would try to avoid contact and then make a quality pitch and then get hit and then the wheels would start to turn mentally, it seems to be that situation again. I don’t think you’re seeing as many fluke home runs but, boy, you’re seeing some balls really driven off pitches that, quite honestly, aren’t that bad. Whatever mistakes we’ve made have just been absolutely hammered.

“Atlanta scored 19 runs on 42 hits in three games here. They had 14 extra-base hits, seven of them home runs. And then they went to Chicago and they scored four runs on 19 hits in three games at Wrigley. They had four extra-base hits and one home run. So that’s always going to be the case. You’re always going to have moments like that.

“But it’s not playing the same as it has over the last couple of years. Now, we’ve pitched (poorly), too, so that has certainly contributed to it. But the first game of the doubleheader the other day, Nicasio threw a fastball down and in at 95 (mph) to Carlos Lee and he hit a rocket into left-center and I went, ‘Gosh darn, I don’t know how that happened right there.'”

So I asked what fans have asked me: Is the humidor turned on? Did the Rocks forget to pay the electric bill?

“Oh, it’s the same setting and everything,” O’Dowd said. “Honestly, I wish we could turn that sucker up at times.”

I mentioned that far from the bounce-back effect we’ve seen with Hammel and Lindstrom in Baltimore, Ubaldo Jimenez has a higher ERA in Cleveland than he had in Colorado. Although the Indians’ massive run support has provided him with a respectable won-loss record of 5-4, his ERA is 5.79. Last year, his ERA in Cleveland after the trade was 5.10. Pitching for the Rockies, his 2011 ERA before the trade was 4.68. In 2010, his best year, it was 2.88.

“I know I’m taking a pounding, some of it justified, but man, where would we be if we had held onto Ubaldo?” O’Dowd asked. “Seriously, what would we have done?

“Right now, we’ve got (Joseph) Gardner pitching well in Double-A, (Matt) McBride is fourth in the (Pacific Coast League) in hitting, Pomeranz is a work in progress and with all White’s struggles, his numbers are better than Jimenez, pitching half his games in Coors Field!”

(White’s ERA is slightly higher, but his walk/strikeout ratio and baserunners-per-inning (WHIP) numbers are substantially better.)

The Rocks obtained all four in exchange for Jimenez.

Between the injuries and spontaneous implosions to veterans who were supposed to bridge the gap to the young pitching, the Rocks are force-feeding major league innings to young starters who are learning on the job. The club has little choice now but to ride those kids, for better or worse.

“I knew this was going to be a transition year,” O’Dowd said. “I never expected Jamie Moyer would last till June. We just looked at him as a guy to give us probably 10 starts at most until we could transition to someone else. But when you’re in the middle now trying to develop a pitching staff, there’s going to be good times and bad times. There’s a ton of ability here and there’s depth to it. We’ve just got to figure a way to get them over the hump, and that’s not going to be easy.”

Moscoso has four quality starts for the Sky Sox in his last four outings through May 24. I asked if it was time to give him another shot with the big league club.

“Yeah, we’re going to give him another shot,” O’Dowd said. “We’re not looking for miracles, we’re really just looking for somebody to come up here and throw consistent strikes. And I think we’re going to stretch Outman out a little bit, too. We’re going to back him up on Friday with Moyer and begin to stretch him out. Though we think he’s most suited to the bullpen, he does look like a duck out of water right now.

“One of the more discouraging things to me has been what’s happened with (Rex) Brothers, because other than the (Jonny) Venters guy in Atlanta, this kid should be one of the more dominant left-handed back-end guys in the game. And his meltdown this year was almost unexplainable to me, to be frank with you. Last season, he gave up one run in his last 16 innings. Started out this year OK, and then it’s been absolutely downhill ever since.”

I asked if it might be a product of overuse. Brothers made 22 appearances in the Rocks’ first 38 games before being sent down. On the other hand, pitching situationally in some of those appearances, he threw a total of 15.1 innings and never more than one inning per game.

“I don’t think so,” O’Dowd said. “I think it’s all mental. I think the kid had such a high expectation for himself as it relates to working into our closer role, I think he just got mentally locked up. I think he was certainly tired at times, but no, I think he’s more mentally tired than physically tired.”

On the bright side, in three outings for the Sky Sox, Brothers has pitched five innings and given up one run on three hits.

With three-fifths of the starting staff learning on the job, I asked if the veteran position players acquired during the offseason, particularly 36-year-old second baseman Marco Scutaro and 35-year-old catcher Ramon Hernandez, were now a mismatch for the young staff.

“I think there’s a misconception about this,” O’Dowd said. “We don’t have a young second baseman to turn to. I wasn’t comfortable going with Chris Nelson and didn’t really have any other alternatives. Jonny Herrera’s not an everyday player. The industry is bereft of second basemen to go get. So I don’t know really what our alternative would have been there.”

(The Rockies’ projected second baseman of the future, Josh Rutledge, turned 23 last month. He is batting .279 at Double-A Tulsa and looks to be at least a year away.)

“In Hernandez’s case, he was brought in for Rosario. He had just got done tutoring (Devin) Mesoraco in Cincinnati for two years, and we thought that Hernandez would be the perfect complement to Rosario as relates to Rosario’s development at the big-league level.

“So both things weren’t designed necessarily to put a championship club on the field. Heck, at the end of this year I’d like to bring Scutaro back. In Hernandez’s case, we feel we’ve got a young guy in Rosario who’s certainly got some rough edges we’ve got to work through and we feel we’ve got a guy here who’s a perfect mentor to him. (Chris) Iannetta would have never accepted that.”

I asked if veteran Will Nieves, recently called up to replace the injured Hernandez, might be a good complement to Rosario going forward.

“He could be. Same type of guy,” O’Dowd said. “I thought (assistant GM) Bill Geivett did a great job, he and (player development director Jeff) Bridich, in bringing Nieves back here. I think we’ve got good catching. That’s the shame of it. I really do think this is one of the better position-player clubs as far as how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.”

I asked how long it might be before Pomeranz gets another shot at the big-league level.

“Last night (Tuesday, May 29), he threw six innings, gave up nine hits, five of them were hit hard — I watched the game on MiLB.TV — he didn’t walk anybody and punched out seven. I thought he looked much more athletic. But we’re not going to bring him back here until we get his delivery back to the way he looked in Cleveland, not the way he looked here, because this was a 92 to 94, 95 (mph) guy throwing 88 to 90 here. He threw 91 last night, so it’s creeping back up. I’d love to have him back in the rotation by the beginning of July.”

And Chacin?

“Chacin’s injury, we got good news last week on it, which was it was not an artery problem like (Aaron) Cook. He has a nerve issue. Every time he went to cock and throw, there’s a nerve that runs right under your clavicle that was really almost cutting everything off on him. So we think we’ve found what was wrong, but now getting it right, I don’t know how long that’s going to take. I’m hoping we get him back right after the All-Star break, if he’s one of our better guys at that point. Eventually, we hope some of these kids start stepping up.”

I noted that O’Dowd is taking a lot of heat from unhappy fans.

“I’m used to that,” he said. “It’s my 30th year doing this. If I get (fired) at the end of the year, then it happens. There’s nothing I can do about that. I believe in what we’re doing. This is painful. I get it. But I like our players, I like what’s going on in our clubhouse, I like the ownership some of our players are taking, I like the lessons some of them are learning.

“So I think a lot of good things are going on. I never expected Pacheco to turn into this. Rosario to me is way ahead of schedule. EY has completely turned his career around, which has forced Dexter to step up or Dexter knows he’s going out. And I have to tell you, I couldn’t be more pleased with the LeMahieu-Colvin deal for (Ian) Stewart.

“Colvin, that kid can hit a fastball. He’s still got to learn to hit a breaking ball and change-up, but he absolutely can hit anybody’s fastball.

“I know it looks like crap. I just think we’re positioned really well. I think the Pomeranzes and the Whites and the Friedrichs and the Nicasios, I think a year from now we could have one of the best starting rotations in our division and it could last for a long time. If I don’t survive, then whoever’s going to take my job is going to be in a really good situation.”

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