So ugly you can’t look away, the Rockies reached the absolute nadir.
The Angels annihilated Colorado on Saturday at Coors Field, 25-1, in the Rockies’ worst loss in franchise history.
Los Angeles broke the humidor in the baseball bloodbath while setting a franchise record for largest victory, runs and hits with 28. The Rockies, meanwhile, were ripped into infamy by the visiting lineup as Chase Anderson and Matt Carasiti combined to give up a club-record 13 runs in the third inning.
“I don’t think about (negative) records,” Rockies manager Bud Black insisted. “It’s one game.”
But it didn’t feel like just one game. It felt like the darkest omen yet in a first-half full of them as the Rockies are steering straight toward the cliff ahead of the all-star break.
A red-dotted crowd of 45,274 was on hand for the see-it-to-believe-it performance, and they gave a raucous, sarcastic standing ovation to mock the home club when Carasiti finally recorded the third out of that nightmare third.
There were also several rounds of loud boos on a night where the crowd was rooting for a blowout record, and not the Rockies, by mid-game.
“The fans definitely deserve better out of us, especially in a game like tonight,” Brenton Doyle said. “They’re free to (boo) as they please, and that was a pretty ugly game on our part. The boos are probably appropriate.”
After the Angels tacked on eight more runs off Noah Davis in the fourth, helped out by Doyle losing a pop-fly in the sky in left-center, their 23 runs scored before the fifth inning were the most in the first four frames of any MLB game since the 1922 Cubs plated 25 against the Phillies.
Davis got pegged for another run in the sixth, making his nine earned runs the most given up by a reliever in Rockies history.
The grisly details will no doubt make for bullet-points on the keynote slide for the year-end Where Things Went So So Wrong powerpoint as this summer’s Rockies continue to make a strong case as the worst team in franchise history. Colorado’s first 100-loss season is on the table now more than ever.
Anderson started the disastrous third already down 2-0 and proceeded to yield homers on three straight pitches to Mike Trout, Brandon Drury and Matt Thaiss. The combined 1,287 feet worth of dingers in less than two minutes gave Los Angeles a 5-0 lead.
Trout’s homer to center was off a fastball, Drury hammered a cutter into the left-center bleachers and Thaiss took a hanging curve over the right-field out-of-town scoreboard. Anderson became only the second pitcher in Rockies history to allow a homer on three straight pitches, replicating Mark Thompson’s dubious distinction against the Dodgers in 1996, and Anderson did so for the second time in his career.
“Those were bad pitches, bad execution,” Anderson said. “I came out in the third and just didn’t make pitches. They were seeing the ball really well.”
But the rout was just getting started as the Angels stomped out all the feel-good fuzzies from Friday’s series opener, when Elias Diaz’s grand slam with two outs in the eighth inning lifted the Rockies to a 7-4 comeback victory and negated back-to-back dingers by Shohei Ohtani and Trout off Kyle Freeland earlier in the game.
That felt like a distant memory as the Angels sent 16 batters to the plate in the third, a Colorado record, and ended up with four dingers in the frame after Mickey Moniak’s two-out, 409-foot shot to left-center off Carasiti. That tied a Rockies single-inning record, as did the Angels’ 10 hits.
“They just kept tacking on runs, and tacking on runs,” Anderson said. “And their pitcher (right-hander Griffin) Canning stayed focused and put up six zeros for them, and didn’t walk anybody.”
When the carnage was over, the crooked number on the scoreboard said everything about a club mired in an identity crisis.
Beset by injuries, a lack of bona fide talent and practically zero true starting-pitching depth, Saturday is what happens when the game catches up to a major-league club that consistently rolls out a lineup filled mostly with minor-leaguers, inexperienced talent and past-prime veterans. The Rockies aren’t the lowly Athletics, who are fast-tracking to one of the worst MLB seasons ever, but they’re close.
The defeat topped the previous worst losses in Rockies history in terms of deficit, both of which came in the inaugural season of Coors Field: a 26-7 crushing by the Cubs on Aug. 18, 1995, and a 17-0 shutout at the hands of the Marlins on Sept. 17 of that year. Colorado’s lost nine of its last 10 and remains mired in the cellar of the National League West with the second-worst record in the league at 30-49.
Doyle finally gave the crowd something to genuinely cheer about with his leadoff homer in the eighth, a 426-foot blast to center field off Angels southpaw Kolton Ingram to avoid the shutout. Without Doyle’s stroke, the Rockies were staring at the largest shutout defeat in modern MLB history, and largest since the Providence Grays won 28-0 over the Phillies in 1883.
“I put a good swing on a hanging slider,” Doyle said. “It’s nice to not have a shutout, but this was a tough loss. The beauty of this game is we get to do this tomorrow, and we have a chance to win the series.”
Despite the rookie’s purple-tinted outlook, this loss to Los Angeles might not flush so easily considering Saturday marked the second-largest run-differential in a road win in an MLB game since 1901 — and further made owner Dick Monfort’s preseason prediction of a .500 ballclub look like a pipe dream. Only the Rangers’ 27-run win over the Orioles at Camden Yards in 2007 was a worse smackdown by a road team in modern baseball history.
