DENVER — When it rains, it pours.
That was true figuratively for the Rockies earlier than their thrilling 5-4 walk-off victory over the Padres at Coors Field on Sunday afternoon, after they discovered franchise stalwart Charlie Blackmon has a proper hand fracture, including to an already prolonged harm listing.
And it was true actually towards the tip of the sport, when the skies opened and rain started to pour earlier than a deluge soaked the ballpark upon Ryan McMahon’s dramatic game-tying house run within the backside of the ninth. Then, after a rain delay of an hour and 25 minutes, Nolan Jones crushed a 472-foot homer to right-center discipline to win it.
It was MLB’s longest walk-off house run since Statcast monitoring started in 2015.
Suddenly, with so many veterans sidelined, the Rockies’ youth motion had been accelerated.
“There’s some symmetry there, right?” supervisor Bud Black mentioned. “You don’t like to see the injured list of your team look like this. That’s not how you draw it up. You like to have young players come in when you want them to come in. But now it’s out of necessity.”
Necessity, they are saying, is the mom of invention. And within the Rockies’ case, it could result in the franchise studying rather more rapidly what its future holds. As Black famous, it’s not excellent — improvement calls for well timed promotion to the Majors and cautious cultivation when there.
But the promotion of 1 participant Sunday morning couldn’t have been timed higher. Infielder Coco Montes, 26, received the decision to the large leagues following a robust season at Triple-A Albuquerque wherein he posted a .960 OPS with 12 house runs in 59 video games.
A number of hours later, Montes discovered himself on the plate representing the tying run in opposition to veteran reliever Luis García within the eighth inning, his membership six outs from shedding a seventh straight contest.
“He threw me a first-pitch slider and I chased it,” Montes mentioned. “And I kind of sat on it again, thinking he’d go back to it, and he left me a good pitch to hit.”
Montes belted it into the left-field seats for a game-tying two-run homer.
“What Coco did today was awesome,” mentioned McMahon, whose personal heroics would come shortly thereafter. “The kid’s a ballplayer, man. You guys are going to really enjoy watching him play.”
McMahon isn’t a “kid,” within the conventional baseball vernacular, however he’s no previous man, both. And he continued his wonderful stretch on the plate since May 25, doing so with the dramatic aptitude often discovered within the films.
As a gradual rain started morphing right into a downpour, the gloomy climate appeared it will function a metaphor for the Rockies’ present situation amid an eleventh loss in 13 video games. And issues weren’t helped by McMahon falling into an 0-2 gap main off the ninth in opposition to lefty reliever Tom Cosgrove, who hadn’t allowed a run over his first 14 MLB appearances.
“I’m not going to lie — I didn’t see the ball very well those first couple pitches,” he mentioned. “I saw it good the third time.”
McMahon belted the third straight slider from Cosgrove for his sixth homer in 16 video games. As it soared by means of the raindrops on its method to hitting the higher deck in proper discipline, the depth of the storm soared with it.
As quickly as McMahon’s game-tying drive settled into the seats, the competition went right into a delay.
When play resumed, Padres reliever Brent Honeywell received the primary two outs earlier than Jones stepped to the plate. The 25-year-old outfielder/first baseman had already impressed through the homestand, launching a 483-foot homer earlier within the week and stealing a base in 4 consecutive video games.
But, as with McMahon, none of that mattered on this second. And Jones made probably the most of it, demolishing a Honeywell changeup almost so far as his earlier clout to clinch probably the most electrical Rockies victory of 2023.
With veteran stars like Blackmon, Kris Bryant and C.J. Cron sidelined for a crew seeking its subsequent chapter, the poetic “symmetry,” as Black referred to as it, was not misplaced on Jones.
“It’s really freakin’ fun,” Jones mentioned. “The past couple of days not having gone the way we wanted … it’s huge.”
As for Blackmon, the face of the franchise for greater than a decade and some of the beloved gamers in Rockies historical past, having to overlook the following 4 to 6 weeks can be tough. But not less than he will get to observe what the long run may appear to be for his ballclub whereas he sits.
“It’s really fun to see,” Blackmon mentioned. “On paper, we don’t really have anything close to Plan A right now. But I’d say our Plan B is looking good.”
Content Source: www.mlb.com