MVN - Most Valuable Network

Rockies take two of three from Twins, but is it too late?

Finally, if only for a day, Jeff Francis was the Jeff Francis we expected him to be.  I wouldn’t call it dominating, but with the offense coming through, Francis’s six-plus innings of two-run ball were good enough for the Rockies to win and for the Franchise to pick up his first win of 2008.

The problem is that even after the first weekend of interleague play, the Rockies are just 17-27 and eleven games out of first place.  It’s still too early to be declaring the Rockies dead, but it certainly looks like they’re on life support.  While it’s true that the team is only one off its pace from last season — the Rockies were 18-26 through 44 games last season — last season was much different.  For one thing, last year nobody in the West looked as strong through this point in the season as the Diamondbacks do this year.  The Rockies were only seven games off the division lead at this time last season.

The other thing is that the team just doesn’t look as strong this season.  Jeff Francis was just starting to kick things into gear around this time last season, but the difference is that, until injuries struck, the Rockies had a solid veteran rotation behind Francis and Cook with Josh Fogg and Rodrigo Lopez.  Fogg and Lopez weren’t great, but they were solid, and you at least knew what you were getting from them every five days.  This season, Franklin Morales had enough issues that he got sent down to AAA (where he still has issues), while Ubaldo Jimenez is working his out in the majors.  Now the Rockies are depending on Greg Reynolds and Jorge de la Rosa to start every five days.  It’s difficult to plan for October when three-fifths of your starting rotation consists of a wildly inconsistent 27-year-old, a wildly inconsistent 24-year-old, and a 22-year-old rookie.  Heck, if you want to argue that having Jeff Francis in his current state makes for two wildly inconsistent 27-year-old lefties, I wouldn’t argue too much with that.

And the lineup, it turns out, isn’t as good as last year.  The injury to Tulowitzki obviously hurts, but the departure of Kaz Matsui hurt much, much more than expected.  Tulowitzki’s absence is mitigated a bit by Clint Barmes playing well, but we can’t expect him to be this good all year.  Slow starts by Brad Hawpe and Willy Taveras (seriously, Willy?  .293 SLG?) have also hurt the Rockies.

The gist is that the Rockies still have a shot, but it’s a long one.  2007 was great, but comebacks like that don’t happen every year.  It’s too early to count the team out — but the poor start has certainly killed any momentum the team had coming into the season.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.