Rotation highlights Coors double standard

Coors: A brand of beer and, in baseball, the worst kind of label. The Rockies have dealt with the consistent criticism that their offensive numbers are inflated by the mile-high altitude of Coors Field, and that label has been dropped time and again to discredit the merits of the club’s former and current sluggers.

But since it’s clear the Coors label is going to subsist as a pejorative by which both the national media and the average Twitter Joe devalue Colorado players offensively, then shouldn’t it also be used as a compliment to pitchers who have, relatively speaking, tamed the beast?

“Hitters get knocked for playing at elevation, but our pitchers don’t get any extra credit for doing really well here,” shortstop Trevor Story said. “So yeah, there’s a double standard, because our starting rotation has carried us the past month-plus and there’s no extra attention there, really, even though they did a lot of that at home.”

Alas, the Coors Field double standard — irrelevant for much of the franchise’s 25-year history simply because of the dearth of quality starting pitching in Denver — is being brought into the bright warm LoDo sunlight this season, as clear as day for everyone to see.

“Over the course of time of the Rockies, there haven’t been as many quality pitchers who put up numbers like so many of the hitters here have,” southpaw Kyle Freeland reasoned.

“Dante Bichette, Larry Walker, Todd Helton and now Nolan Arenado, Chuck (Blackmon), DJ (LeMahieu) — there are all those guys from the 1990s until now who have put up monster numbers here, and I think people are kind of blinded by that. They don’t look at the pitcher’s side of it, which had been understandable seeing as historically the numbers are lopsided toward hitters’ success here.”

But this season, it’s the hometown kid himself — Freeland is a 2011 graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School — who has underscored the general oversight of a talented Colorado rotation that manager Bud Black calls “really unfair.”

“If a pitcher is pitching well in a ballpark that is hitter-friendly — and there’s a number of them —

that shouldn’t go unnoticed,” Black said.

Freeland has emerged as Colorado’s best starting pitcher, and with a home ERA of 2.18, the 25-year-old left-hander is on pace to break Jorge De La Rosa’s club record for the best single-season ERA at Coors Field. De La Rosa’s 2.76 mark in 2013 marked the only time a Rockies starter has posted a sub-3.00 ERA at Coors Field.

Yet Freeland drew little all-star chatter outside of Denver, and even as his surge continued into the second half, you probably won’t find him the subject of ESPN specials or hyped in many national columns despite the fact that Sabermetrics rank him among the best starting pitchers in all of baseball.

Per Baseball Reference, Freeland is sixth in the MLB in WAR (wins against replacement) and ninth in adjusted ERA. And according to Fangraphs, the left-hander’s WPA (win probability added, which gives an idea of which players helped their teams the most during the most important parts of a game) ranks fourth in the National League.

The three pitchers he trails in that category — the Mets’ Jacob deGrom, the Nationals’ Max Scherzer and the Phillies’ Aaron Nola — were all allstars, and the NL Cy Young will probably be decided between Scherzer and Nola. But while those three East Coast arms soak up plenty of ink, don’t expect Freeland’s profile to skyrocket even if he continues to pitch like an ace down the stretch of the season.

After Freeland, the performances of fellow southpaw Tyler Anderson, as well as right-handers German Mar- quez, Antonio Senzatela, Chad Bettis and Jon Gray, have also catalyzed the team back into the divisional chase. As a unit, Colorado posted a 1.71 home ERA during July, a franchise record low for a single month.

And even though the rotation’s collective ERA (4.24) ranks in the middle half of the NL, the Rockies are first in the league in team WPA, and their park-adjusted ERA for starters is third in the NL.

“People are going to look at things like ERAs, and we don’t rank very high in ERA,” reliever Adam Ottavino said. “But if you look at the big picture (for Colorado starters) — and there are some stats out there that do — it’s pretty favorable.”

Footnotes.

As Black announced Monday, Chad Bettis made his return to the Rockies’ rotation Tuesday, and with that Colorado correspondingly optioned catcher Tom Murphy to Triple-A to make room for the right-hander on the roster. Murphy, 27, hit .227 (20-for-88) in 31 games with Colorado since being recalled June 12. He has batted .220 in 72 career games with the Rockies dating to 2015, and Black noted the catcher knows what he needs to improve on back with the Albuquerque Isotopes. “We talked long and hard, Murph and I and the hitting coaches, about the strikeouts and the strikeoutto-walk ratio,” Black said. “Adjustments have to be made with the swing. On the defensive side, he’s gotten a lot better from two years ago. … But the setup, the target, the blocking, the mechanics, his positioning — there are things he still has to work on.”