Rockies hit bump with young rotation
Good beginning fades as starters take lumps in eight-game skid
Colorado SAN FRANCIS CO Rockies left-hander Kyle Freeland noticed the difference last Saturday at Dodger Stadium.
A team he had held to a total of two runs in two previous starts was on to him. Hitters were laying off his bread-and-butter sinking fastball and punishing it when he elevated it in the strike zone. It was almost as if they knew what was coming.
The cat-and-mouse game had changed, and this time Freeland was the one getting chased, as the Los Angeles Dodgers tagged him for 10 hits and five runs over six innings in a 6-1 loss.
“I’m sure they watched a lot of video on me, and coming off two starts prior against them, they kind of knew how I pitch and how I attacked them,” Freeland said. “So their game plan went with that, and that kind of hurt me. We made an adjustment a little too late.”
Recognizing opponents’ changes in approach is one of the key lessons facing a Rockies rotation that has relied on four rookies — Freeland and righthanders Antonio Senzatela, German Marquez and Jeff Hoffman — to make 50 starts as the club has posted the best 81game record in franchise history at 47-34.
The rookies, in some cases pressed into action because more experienced Jon Gray ( broken foot), Chad Bettis (testicular cancer) and Tyler Anderson (knee injury) have been sidelined, initially responded in spectacular fashion.
Through May, they had combined for an 18-7 record, and none of them had an ERA above 3.76. Some of them continued to perform well in early June, but lately they have hit a collective slump that has played a major role in Colorado’s eight-game losing streak.
Six of those losses have been by at least four runs as the team’s starters have compiled a 10.22 ERA during the skid, with one quality start (at least six innings, three or fewer earned runs). Senzatela was moved to the bullpen Monday, partly to limit his innings but also so he could work through his struggles, as his June ERA sat at 8.86 in four starts.
“I’m fine with it,” said Senzatela, a 22-year-old Venezuelan who endured shoulder woes at Class AA in 2016. “This is my first season, and I realize I only pitched (342⁄ 3) innings last season, and now I’m already up to 90. I understand what they’re trying to do.”
Manager Bud Black said the club was paying close attention to the rookies’ workload and their performance. There are constant discussions going on about ways to help them cope, be it with a bullpen stint, skipping a start or extra days off.
But the learning process also calls for them to employ long-established principles of effective pitching, namely getting ahead in the count with strikes and changing speeds to throw hitters’ timing off. The pitchers are also working with a catching duo — Tony Wolters and Tom Murphy — not exactly long on experience.
“The pitcher always has the advantage on a first-time look, but that’s starting to decrease a little bit with our guys,” Black said. “So they’re not going to get by on the unknown or hitters having to react to something they haven’t seen before. They have to truly make pitches. That will be the great test for them.”
Freeland got only a C grade Wednesday, when in his third start against the San Francisco Giants he pitched six innings and yielded four runs — including a tiebreaking homer for the first ca-
reer hit by South Korean infielder Jae- Gyun Hwang — in a 5-3 loss that completed a three-game sweep for the woeful Giants.
More such challenges await Freeland’s young staff mates as the Rockies pursue their first postseason berth since 2009.
Recent history of rookie-laden rotations is not on their side. The 2015 Cincinnati Reds set a bigleague record by having a rookie start each of their last 64 games as they rebuilt the staff. That club went 64-98 and was last in the National League Central.
Six years before that, the Oakland Athletics relied on rookies to start 70% of their games. That team also wound up last in its division, at 75-87.
“That’s one of the questions we’re facing,” injured outfielder Gerardo Parra said of the callow pitchers. “People who know baseball realize it’s not easy to ride four young starters all the way to the World Series. But anything can happen in baseball, and we’re seeing a lot of new things in the game. The guys have done an excellent job. We know they haven’t thrown 200 innings in the minors, but hopefully they’ll stay strong and continue to help us.”
Gray’s return Friday will ease the load, but the rookies’ task might become even more difficult as the weather warms in the summer and the ball takes off at Coors Field, a hitters’ paradise under most circumstances.
Players have long maintained that it’s harder to recover from the rigors of the game when playing in Denver’s mile-high altitude, and pitchers’ breaking balls typically don’t have the same bite there. For all but one of the Rockies’ rookie starters, playing a full summer under those conditions will be a new experience.
Freeland, who was born and raised in Denver, emphasizes the importance of staying hydrated, a point he’s sure to make as part of the youngsters’ exchange of information.
“We communicate, especially going through this little rough patch through the rotation,” Freeland said. “We talk about hitters. If we’re facing the same team, same series, we talk to each other like, ‘Hey, this guy made this adjustment, be smart with him, you may want to pitch him a little differently.’ ”
These days, those conversations take place rather frequently.