FREELAND READY TO PROVE PUNDITS WRONG
Kyle Freeland has more guts than a five-hour marathon of slasher movies. Dude doesn’t fear the Dodgers. Or the Padres. Or the unseen pundits that hate the Colorado Rockies right now even more than you do.
“I said last year, I don’t mind being a snake in the grass,” the Rockies’ left-handed starter and Denver native said Thursday. “This is a great opportunity for us to shock the world.”
Man, do our hearts want him to be right.
Man, do our heads know better. Everybody in baseball talks tough in February, the way every NFL club in April claims they just won the draft.
If the Rockies are going to shock the world, the starting pitching doesn’t have to be good. It has to be great.
Like Dodgers/Padres/Mets great. They’re going to have to talk about this rotation the way people talk about the Braves of the ‘90s. If Freeland has enough Tom Glavine in him, the analytics wonks are going to have to eat their spreadsheets.
But that’s a high bar. And a rare beast. History tells us trading future Hall of Famers to the St. Louis Cardinals tends to turn out well for one side, and that’s the side in red.
The summer after the Cubs dealt Lou Brock to the Redbirds, the North Siders won 72 games. They went 59103 the season after that. FanGraphs has the Rox winning 68 games this season. PECOTA pegs them for 60.
“I mean, I think that should be our sole motivating factor,” Freeland said
of the naysayers. “That’s kind of the position I like to be in: Being an underdog, being someone who the general public thinks is not going to perform at all.
“So I think, as a whole, the team, we’re using that as a chip on our shoulder to push us through this season and shock the world and prove the doubters wrong.”
A season where the ceiling is third place feels doomed from the start. But 100 losses? Come on. You’ve got to try, really try, to stink up the joint for that many months.
Onpaper,theRockieshave enough arms to be decent, if everything else somehow breaks right. Which could be a mixed blessing, depending on whether your joy for 2021 stems from the Rox actually competing or the Rox going down like the Hindenburg.
“We have some incredible players on this team,” stressed Freeland, who rebounded from a nightmare 2019 to finish 2-3 with a 4.33 ERA in a pandemic-shortened 2020 slate. “We may be young. We may not have superstars that a lot of other teams that are stacked up (with). But that’s a spot that I love to be in.”
Your heart aches a little for shortstop Trevor Story, although he’s going to get paid by somebody else, and soon. But it absolutely breaks for Freeland, the hometown pitcher who made good.
The playoff window opened. The window closed. It’s going to be a matter of selling off parts soon, hopefully for a better return than what Nolan Arenado brought back.
To 98% of that clubhouse, the Rockies are a job, the palace where you just happen to work. It’s a paycheck. For No. 21, it’s more than that. Freeland, a Thomas Jefferson High alum, bleeds purple. The pride is real. So is the pain.
“I think it’s great, and getting Kyle out front vocally on that, I think it’s awesome,” manager Bud Black said. “We’ve talked
about that often, about Kyle being a Denver native, and he’s able to pitch and play for his favorite team … but I think the Rockies, at least since I’ve been here, have always been the underdog. And our guys relish that. And probably now moreso than ever.”
So now that Freeland’s thrown down the gauntlet, one question:
Who’s going to pick the blasted thing up?
The lineup? The new guys? Lefty Austin Gomber, the headliner in The Great Areando Heist, told Denver scribes Thursday that he’s a flyball pitcher. Loud and proud. Wonderful.
“The best thing you can do in Coors Field,” Freeland noted, “is keep that ball on ground as much as you can. Try to avoid putting that in the air.”
Kid’s going to figure it out the hard way. Along with the rest of us. The downside with being a snake in the grass is getting trampled underfoot.