MVN - Most Valuable Network

For one night, Rockies don’t suck. Okay, Aaron Cook doesn’t suck.

In 2008, the Rockies are 12-6 on days when Aaron Cook is the starting pitcher. That’s the good news. The bad? Well, the Rockies are 21-45 when anybody else starts a game.

That was very much the case last night, when Cook ignored the plane nosediving behind him and pitched the Rockies to a win that ended an eight-game losing streak.  Anybody who complains about the length of baseball games should have seen the performance last night.  Cook shut down the Padres in just short of two hours, pitching a complete game shutout, giving up five hits and no walks.  He faced just three batters more than the minimum and threw a mere 79 pitches — that’s a mere 2.63 pitches per batter faced. The Padres obviously decided that waiting around was pointless and swung early and often — and mostly badly. Cook induced 15 groundouts, including two key double-play balls. He even got a hit himself. Hell, Cook probably could have gone 10 or 11 innings if the Rockies had needed him to. He was that good last night.

It wasn’t necessary, though, as the Rockies plated the mandatory one run necessary to get the win behind Cook’s performance, and even added on three more. It still wasn’t a great night for the offense — all of the Rockies’ runs came in one inning — and it’s certainly not going to be enough when the Rockies get their usual performance from a non-Aaron Cook starting pitcher.

So for one night, we can erase the horrific memories of the most recent eight-game losing streak and take solace in the fact that Aaron Cook still pitches for us. We’ve already established that the Rockies should be sellers at the trade deadline — but Aaron Cook is one player who should still have a place on this team.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 1:51 am 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.