See? This is a high altitude joke! Because they’re playing in Denver, you know? Pretty awesome, right? i know i’m awesome Yes, it’s a burden, but one that I carry for you. Because you deserve it.
Anyway, this season seems to be the Rockies’ turn to poke fun at the Padres’ ambitions to run with the big dogs of the NL West. The San Francisco Giants also seem to be picking up where they left off. But now it’s a given that the Giants will weave nothing but good out of the airwaves. However, the Rockies could be the ether. They sit directly with the Giants in a game behind the league-leading Dodgers.
The question, of course, is how long can they stay there? Are they just a product of sample size and riding a good wave of baseball madness? The answers are “surprisingly a bit longer” and “yes, quite a bit,” as diametrically opposed as those two things are.
It’s always difficult with the Rockies, and that goes beyond their institutionalized organizational craziness, cheapness, and idiocracy. The first thing that comes to mind about the Rockies is offense and runs given the environment in which they play. But when they had their last spasm of actual competence in 2017 and 2018, it was largely built on a homegrown pitching baton. When they started eating worms again, most thought they had a good throwing stick, when they didn’t.
This version certainly hits the ball, 8th in MLB in runs scored. But the big story so far has been starting pitcher Chad Kuhl, who has a 1.10 ERA through three starts. Kuhl was a candidate to be one of those junk finds that gets hooked up by the right pitching coach or finds a new pitch and becomes a whole thing.
Kuhl is using a new pitch these days, a sinker, which has become his most used, 41 percent of the time, up from 13 last season. The big effect is that hitters are chasing it out of the zone far more often than before, a 40 percent pursuit rate in 2022, up from 13 percent last year. That explains why Kuhl was successful without hitting too many hitters. A K-Rate of 21 percent is hardly anything to laugh about, but it’s pretty standard. What Kuhl has done is keep the ball off the barrel of the racquet as his 2.4 percent barrel rate is one of the lowest in the league. As a result, its line-drive rate has also dropped from the 20s to a previous 14 percent mark in 2022.
But it’s never that easy. Kuhl is currently running a .190 BABIP, and that’s likely to expand quickly. So will his ERA when the time comes. But as long as very few ever hit him hard, he’ll probably still be effective. Similarly, this season Austin Gomber has been able to dance around the flesh of opponents’ clubs with a barrel rate of 6.7 percent, which has also lowered the number of line drives against him. Gomber was actually unlucky with balls in play against him and runners on base, so he’s also a contender to hold the line.
Outside of the pen, Tyler Kinley and Daniel Bard have been very suppressive, with the former sniffing his slider at nearly 60 percent. Justin Lawrence took a different approach, getting nearly 65 percent grounders when he was on the hill. The pen might actually be fine in the long term.
Offensively… well, that’s probably the whoopie cushion to sit on eventually. CJ Cron has six home runs and batting .667, and Cron has had plus offensive seasons before. But Cron’s success so far has largely depended on nearly 40 percent of his flyballs ending on home runs, and that’s not going to stay that way, especially since baseball proper has been so drained this season. Connor Joe has an OPS of 1,022 between his unsuccessful searches for a surname. But he also has a BABIP of .366 with no speed and no aha contact numbers. He has plus racquet-to-ball ability and makes a lot of contact which should keep him from sinking any further than a viable racquet. Randall Grichuk will eventually meet the fate of someone with a terminal case of being Randall Grichuk. Charlie Blackmon (feel free to call him “Chuck Nasty”) appears to have gone to the late-career trick of “selling himself for fastballs.” He pulls everything, makes less contact but puts more balls in the air. He’ll be hoping to overtake his increasing strikeouts with increased power.
So yeah, there’s a lot of air in the Rockies’ start. And they haven’t actually played anyone yet since their schedule was Rangers-Cubs-Phillies-Tigers after they started with the Dodgers. But their schedule doesn’t really fit from here and next month either. Your next two weeks are Phillies-Reds-Nationals-D-Backs. You’ll see the Giants six times and the Mets three times in May, but this month will be rounded out with a Pirates-Nats-Marlins course. Profits on the bank in April and May still count as much as later in the year. It’s safe to assume the East will produce at least two playoff teams, but the Central is a joke, and the more distance they can put in front of the Padres now…well, who knows?
Baseball can get weird, and it has to get really weird to keep the Rockies around. But it’s not a level of weirdness that the craziest game can’t possibly reach.
