Do the Rockies need a Holliday?
Anybody have the cell number for Matt Holliday? The Rockies need your bat, Big Daddy. And fast. With the playoff race heating up, the Colorado offense is outta gas.
Chew on this: The Rockies can’t hit. Who would’ve thunk it?
“Baseball is a weird sport, man,” shortstop Trevor Story said Wednesday, after Colorado lost 4-3 to Pittsburgh.
Well, weird is probably too nice a word for what’s happening to the Rockies, whose bats are kind of like my car keys: Right here, somewhere, but danged if I can find ’em. So Story obliged me with other terms for the game’s current relationship with Colorado hitters. “Cruel,” Story said. “Tough.” If hitting is contagious, then so is frustration that can build when a batting order falls into a collective funk.
“Very contagious,” Story said, “for sure.”
Right now, a Colorado baserunner at third base is only 90 feet from home but might as well be standing on a planet in a galaxy far, far away.
In the bottom of the ninth, with the Rockies trailing by only a run and 35,702 spectators hanging around LoDo, waiting for a rally, the ballpark sound system might as well have played Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty.”
From Charlie Blackmon to Nolan Arenado, there are big bats throughout the Colorado lineup, but during these dog days of summer, they sometimes appear too pooped to pop.
As the Rockies dropped the rubber match of a three-game series against the Pirates, Blackmon did contribute two hits, but Chuck Nazty might be showing the wear and tear of working long hours in the wide-open prairie that is center field at Coors Field, as he’s batting an un-Nazty-like .206 since July 22.
On an otherwise beautiful summer afternoon, the lone way Arenado reached base was by taking a 95 mph fastball to his left shoulder, which maybe should earn him a day off to let the purple fade from that bruise, except those mean-and-nasty Dodgers are coming to town. So there’s no rest for the weary.
Three is Colorado’s tragic number. In the past 16 games, which have seen the team lose
times, the good guys have averaged a paltry 3.1 runs per game. During that span, the Rockies are hitting .228. The most dangerous bat in the lineup Wednesday might’ve belonged to German Marquez (.357 average). And he’s the pitcher.
Manager Bud Black diplomatically refers to this untimely slump as a “lull.” If this weren’t a family newspaper, I might suggest a more descriptive four-letter word. Truth be told, Colorado’s offensive consistency has been an iffy proposition all season long.
“We need that to turn around,” Black said.
Maybe Black should grab the phone in the Colorado dugout and give Holliday a holler. What could it hurt?
For those of you who have lived in Denver only long enough to turn the endless traffic snarl on Interstate 25 into our own little Hotel California (“You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave”), teammates referred to Holliday as “Big Daddy” back in the day. It was a term of endearment for a slugger who hit .319 with 128 home runs in his stint with the Rockies from 2004-08.
When general manager Jeff Bridich signed Holliday to a minor-league deal late last month, it seemed like a good excuse to give to a 38-year-old, semi-retired ballplayer to skip mowing his lawn for a few weeks.
Even in his prime, Holliday was issued a glove primarily to conceal the fingerprints on his next misadventure in the outfield. So it would be a challenge for Black to squeeze him on a 25-man roster as a pinch hitter.
But watching a Rockies rally in the eighth inning die on the bats of Ian Desnine mond and Chris Iannetta gave me the urge to have Dinger pass a cap with an interlocking “C” and “R” among the crowd at Coors to see how long it would take to fund an airplane ticket to Denver from Albuquerque, where Holliday is shaking the rust off his swing for the Isotopes in the minors.
Could the bat of Holliday put a charge in the Rockies’ offense? Maybe. Maybe not. But I do know this: The sight of Big Daddy digging in the batter’s box would cause a delirious Coors crowd to blow the top off the party deck.
The Rockies are 3-7 in the last 10 games. It’s too early to panic. But go 3-7 in the next 10 games, and they could go quietly in the race for the playoffs.
Put a bat in Holliday’s hand and, at the very least, you know Big Daddy will go down swinging loudly.