The San Diego Padres have a four-game series this weekend against the Colorado Rockies, who come in hot at .500.
For the San Diego Padres, playing a series against the Colorado Rockies usually constitutes a breather. Sure, there’s that whole Coors Field pitching issue they have to deal with when the Padres go on the road, but the Rockies have been a good way for the Padres to pad their win total for the last couple of years.
Not now, though. The Rockies are coming into Petco Park at 6-6, which is the same record as the Padres right now, and they’ve been one of the biggest surprises of the young season.
So how has this happened? With good pitching strangely enough. The Rockies haven’t played a lot at Coors Field yet, but they’re also coming in with a four-game winning streak that includes a home sweep against the Houston Astros, which is the first time Colorado has done that since 2012.
The pitchers who have delivered so far include Kyle Freeland (2.39 ERA) and Tomoyuki Sugano (1.69 ERA), with only Michael Lorenzen sporting what would be considered a typical Coors Field ERA at 9.00. But it was Lorenzen who rebounded from a bad start at Coors on April 3 to clinch the sweep with a. 9-1 win.
The Padres will see Sugano tomorrow night as Walker Buehler takes the mound for San Diego, and they’ll get Freeland on Sunday against Nick Pivetta in what should be a good pitching matchup. That’s not the kind of sentence you’d expect to see in any discussion of the Rockies, but the results speak for themselves.
The Rockies also have a new manager in Warren Schaeffer, who stepped in as the interim leader early last season when Bud Black was fired. Schaeffer has talked a lot about “passing the baton” offensively as Colorado goes through its lineup, but that also pertains to the pitchers when they have the inevitable Coors Field pitching adventure.
“It's always been hard to pitch here, and it's going to be hard to pitch here,” Lorenzen said after his series clincher in a piece written by Owen Perkins of MLB.com. “You're going to have bad outings, but you got to bounce back, and you are capable of bouncing back and making those adjustments.”
The Padres will miss Lorenzen this time around, but they’ll be facing a different team than the one they saw last year. It’s too early to say there’s genuine hope in Denver, but the Rockies also won a hard-fought road series against the Toronto Blue Jays by shutting down Toronto’s offense and winning 2-1 in ten innings.
The NL West is now a logjam, with the Rockies, Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks all tied at 6-6 as the three games trail the Los Angeles Dodgers by three games. It’s too early for much of that to matter, but the Padres will be looking to separate themselves from an opponent that’s usually easy to dominate.