Rockies Awards

So for my Rockies awards, I’m going to go through a list of all the players who made significant contributions to the Rockies and give them an award. Maybe it will help them feel better about themselves, because if I was on the Rockies, I’d be depressed.

Taylor Buchholz – The Gary Busey Award for the player who looks like he needs to lay off the uppers.

Aaron Cook – The Ron Howard Award for most ginger player.

Manual Corpas – The Adam Sandler Award for starting out crappy, getting good, then becoming crappy again.

Jorge De La Rosa – The Nicolas Cage Award for interchanging great performances with travesties. (Don't get me wrong, I love Con Air. It's just the southern accent that was so bad it gave cancer to plenty of very cute puppies)

Jeff Francis – The Gary Coleman Award for the player who never went through puberty.

Brian “T-Rex” Fuentes – The Dr. Alan Grant Award for player whose “visual acuity is based on movement.”

Jason Grilli – The John Turturro Award for the player who is pretty good, despite the fact that nobody has ever heard of them.

Matt Herges – The Shawne Merriman Award for the player whose performance was best enhanced by outside sources, but broke down once they could no longer use those performance enhancers.

Ubaldo Jimenez – The Best Pitcher Award for the best pitcher on the team. Nice and simple.

Greg Reynolds – The Brian Griese Award for playing severely below expectations.

Ryan Speier – The Harry Dean Stanton Award for the player who most resembles a good character actor. That is, the player that completes the team, but never really stands out.

Luis Vizcaino – The Frank Caliendo Award for the player who most makes you wonder why anybody would pay them to do anything.

Chris Iannetta – The Antithesis of Ian Malcolm Award for the player who most exhibits a deplorable lack of personality. Seriously, have you seen him get interviewed? I’d rather watch a VH1 Behind the Music of a Christian adult contemporary band.

Yorvit Torrealba – The Yourhighness Morgan Award for the player whose parents exhibited the most courage whilst filling out their birth certificate.

Garrett Atkins -The '06 Justin Morneau Award for the player whose RsBI makes him look much better than he actually is.

Clint Barmes - The Kenny Chesney Award for willingness to walk up to the plate listening to Kenny Chesney.

Todd Helton - Oh, wait, he didn't make a significant contribution to the team. His $15 mil is reward enough.

Ian Stewart - The Rookie of the Year Award for... being... the... Rookie of the Year?

Troy Tulowitzki - The Jose Theodore Award for maybe you should lay off the booze, chicks and Maseratis and focus on playing the sport for which you are paid. (He fixed it in the second half)

Brad Hawpe - The Willem Defoe Award for the player who progressed from being a platoon player to being an everyday player.

Matt Holliday - The Most Valuable Player for the player who best exhibits willful baldness.

Willy Taveras - The Rob Schneider Award for the player who is just plain awful.

Rox Recap 8/5/08 (Winning Baseball Games For Dummies)

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Rox Weekend Recap 4/20/08 (The Morning After the Madness)

For the Rockies since 2000, Minute Maid (Enron) Park has seemed more like Jurassic Park to the Blake Street Bombers. When you first get there, you’re overwhelmed by the majesty and excitement of this new experience, but soon you’re knee deep in Triceratops shit, being hunted by Velociraptors, and listening to Jeff Goldblum ramble on about chaos theory. Going into this weekend’s 3 game series in Houston, the Rockies carried the burden of a 6-20 overall record to go along with countless heartbreaking walk-off defeats (2 coming last year during T-Rex’s Fall-of-the-House-of-the-Usher-esque implosion.) With their 22 inning epic in the rearview mirror, the Rox weren’t expected to do much when they arrived in Houston at 9 am on Friday morning. Everybody had a right to be exhausted and if they would’ve just thrown on their unis and sleepwalked their way through the initial game of this series, no one would’ve blamed them. Instead they made a statement that will hopefully carry through the rest of the season as they ended up taking 2 of 3 from the punchless ‘Stros.

1) Friday’s 11-5 victory was an alarming surprise to the baseball world. The Rockies actually were the opening story on Sportscenter on Friday for probably the first time ever (I actually did check outside for plagues of locusts and rivers of virgin blood, but all I saw were two drunk guys pissing on my neighbor’s car.) The Padres, the losers of the historically long affair, were shut out in Arizona while the Rockies offense got their second, third, and fourth winds with their second string lineup. The Pebbles (Rockies bench players? Just trying it out) accounted for 11 runs on 12 hits including a 6 run first inning where they showed no ill effects of weariness in knocking Astros starter Chris Sampson out after only 2/3 of an inning. Though Franklin Morales did his best to make it interesting in the bottom half of the opening inning by immediately giving back four runs, he settled down and kept the Astros at bay while lasting 5 innings without giving up another. 113 pitches in those 5 innings however is a troubling stat that will have to improve if he hopes to remain in the rotation.

2) Friday’s game gave us a glimpse at the Tulo we remember so fondly from last season when he enjoyed the greatest season ever by an NL Rookie shortstop. He followed his game winning double in the 22^nd inning on Friday morning with another 2 hits, racking up 3 RBIs in the process. Saturday’s game was a step back but on Sunday he knocked in an RBI with a go ahead single in the 7^th. His average is army crawling towards the Mendoza line but he’s putting together more quality at bats than he was even a week ago.

3) Brian Fuentes’ Minute Maid monsters surfaced again on Sunday as he coughed up the 1 run lead the Rox had mustered in the 8^th inning. Former Rocko Kaz HazMat-sui, apparently completely recovered from his surgery to repair an anal fissure, yes, an anal fissure, rocked a 2 run single off the wall to give the Astros a lead they wouldn’t relinquish. Fuentes did pitch a scoreless 8^th in Saturday’s ballgame and until today hadn’t allowed a run in 9 appearances. He’s worked four times in the last five games and should hopefully have the day off tomorrow.

4) I’ve been saying our bullpen has been incredible thus far this season and now I have the statistics to back up my ramblings. Our bullpen has a 2.86 ERA in the season’s first 18 games, the best in the bigs. 5 of our relievers have ERAs under 3.00 leaving only closer Manny Corpas and backup lefty Micah Bowie as the runts of the Rockies’ bullpen litter. If we get any consistency from our starting staff, we’ll be one of the elite teams in the National League. Our offense is starting to rumble and it’s only a matter of time before they’re consistently putting up 5 or 6 runs a game.

5) Ubaldo gave another inconsistent performance on Sunday. Through the first 3 innings, he’d thrown 28 pitches, 23 for strikes and looked unhittable. In the 5^th, the wheels fell off the schnitzel cart. He got two quick outs, then couldn’t hit asphalt if he fell out of a Volkswagon. He walked three in the inning and gave up a bloop single that led to a run before getting out of a bases loaded jam. He ended up surviving for 5 2/3 innings, but in the end, you can just add another uneven line to his career stat sheet. 5 walks and 6 strikeouts won’t cut it for a whole season.

Our 9 game road trip through Arizona, San Diego, and Houston finished with a 5-4 record, a quality road swing for a team whose best season road record is 39-42 (accomplished last season.) The Phillies from Philly come to Coors for a two game set. Mark Redman looks to keep his early season success going as the visitors will definitely be looking to enact some revenge on the Rocks for that embarrassing postseason sweep last year. Pseudo-MVP Jimmy Rollins won’t be making the trip however as the added weight of his conscience from knowing he wasn’t the true MVP in 2007 finally caught up with his balky ankles. Let’s git-r-duuuuuuuuuun.

To quote Soulja Boy, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape”

That may not be Soulja Boy that I just quoted; it may be James Joyce. I guess it doesn’t matter, because their contributions to the English language are roughly equivalent. The point remains; the Rockies, like Soulja Boy or Joyce, are trying to escape history, specifically their own. It has been a history full of home runs, tears, embarrassment and tearful home runs full of embarrassment. Their career record before last season, including the one time they somehow lucked into the playoffs, is .465, which averages to a little over 75 wins per season. That would make the Devil (whoops blasphemy) Rays proud?

Their Captain Fantastic win percentage has, however, been subverted by some lovely moments—EY hitting the first homer in the first Rockies at bat, Dante Bichette’s mullet, umm… that’s about it, but Bichette’s mullet is like the hair equivalent of Steve Perry’s voice/face combination. For a while, Bichette’s epic doo was enough to keep fans in the seats. The Rockies set attendance records and were selling out every game for a half decade. I remember all the crazy fervor when the Rockies debuted under the Rocky Mountain sunset (cliché #37a). Fans were crazy nuts for them. I found myself in the nosebleed section of (not Invesco Field at) Mile High amidst a sellout crowd. And there was hope (cliché #3b). And then there was denial (it’s the altitude). And then there was steaming piles of Triceratops poop with Jeff Goldblum constantly quipping “now that is one big pile of shit” until Todd Helton shot him, took him to a taxidermist, mounted him above his fireplace, and drew a Rollie Fingers mustache on him with a sharpie. And hope was dead; just like God, chivalry and crystal Pepsi.

Then, once upon a time (érase una vez, for our latin friends) the Rockies won a shit-load of games in an anti-shit-load of time. It was fluky, but fun. People were getting loaded in sport bars and cheering instead of downing fifths of whiskey at home and breaking television sets. The bandwagon almost collapsed from the pressure of being overloaded. Young kids were rocking the K-Fed graffiti Rockies hats with the stickers on the bill, which New Era now sews on crooked by default. And hope had made a comeback (cliché #3c? I’ll have to check the clichétionary—yes! Another retarded portmanteau!), just like John Travolta.

And here we are (",babe"? It seems like ",babe" should follow that). The National League Champion Rockies attempt to prove their mettle (or that they're metal). Todd Helton walks up to the plate and tells the pitcher he’s going to superman that ho (see Ulysses by Joyce, James). Then, he cranks that into the Rockpile and runs around the bases yelling “I AM LEGEND!” (Note: that may not actually be true, but I had to insert the obligatory Will Smith reference). Though Todd Helton still rakes like a fox (I must be drunk), the rest of the team looks pretty average. PECOTA predicted the Rockies to win 84 games, or just above average. It seemed fair at the time, with all the questions marks involved. Now, after a super small sample size (8 games), the Rockies look like their going to end up in the 10^th percentile of their PECOTA projection, or the Ben Affleck percentile, as I like to call it.

It is, after all, a long season, and who the hell knows? But the Rockies should consider front office and managerial changes for the long term. I can’t completely hate on O’Dowd because he has drafted some good players, but he has also has made Omar Minaya look smart a few times. An example of his smartification that didn’t end up screwing him: he wanted to draft Denard Span (career minor league OPS: 698), but couldn’t afford him; so he was stuck with some Jeff Francis guy. In terms of Clint “I’m Bringing in Jorge Julio” Hurdle, the Wall Street Journal did a study of managers based on wins in close games, wins above expectation and player performance. Guess where Clint finished… Go on, guess… Oh, you can’t? Well, I’ll tell you. Dead fucking last (http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-baseballMgrs08.html?n=50&page=1&sd=ASC&sort=overall). He’s fun in the post game interview. He has a big funny looking head with goofy hair. But is that worth his shitsational managing (I win again! Shit+senational=brilliant, retarded or retarded brilliant—you choose). The Rockies may have a good season in spite Clinton and Daniel again, but it might be better to build a good organization. Or not.

I’m still thinking of a cool little sign off note, so for this post I’ll settle for:

“I ain’t got time to bleed” – Jesse “the Former Mayor of Minnesota” Ventura in Predator

Maybe I’ll just end with stupid quotes every time.