I feel like, in a weird way, things are much better now that the Trade Deadline is behind us. As I noted last week, I was very sad to see us bid farewell to the players we moved, but it really did lower the tension and stress in the day-to-day. I had come to kind of dread these Saturday recaps, and not because so many of them wound up being truly awful baseball games. I mean, yeah, that was part of it, but when one is still caught up in the narrative of “If we could only win this one, we might still hang onto the hope of contending” it gets exhausting, and especially devastating when we lose.

It’s good to have that behind us. I kinda get the feeling that the team feels that way as well.

So it was an ERod start tonight, and we know that that’s usually gonna be a suboptimal experience. At the same time, Eduardo was going up against Bradley Blaylock, a Rockies rookie starter, like many Rockies rookie pitchers, and starters in general, isn’t very good. So.

Eddie, as it happened, sat Colorado down in order in the first, with two strikeouts and fifteen pitches thrown. Not bad. And we took the lead in the bottom of the first, thanks to successive one-out singles by Ketel Marte, Geraldo Perdomo, and Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. That was all we managed, with an early lead is always nice. 1-0 D-BACKS

Sadly, however, ERod is gonna ERod. He walked the leadoff batter to start the second. He threw some strikes that were called balls in that AB, but well, until the robot umpires arrive, what can you do? The dinger Breton Doyle hit to pretty much straightaway center one out later was certainly on him, as were the two subsequent singles he allowed that brought a third run across. ERod gonna ERod. 3-1 Colorado

He coughed up another run in the top of the third, thanks to another leadoff walk (this one was totally his fault, too), followed by a stolen base and a couple of one-out singles that allowed the walk to score. 4-1 Colorado

Thankfully, however, we were of course facing Colorado pitching. Corbin Carroll led off the bottom of the third with a walk, and a Ketel Marte double to right brought Corbin home. Perdomo grounded out to first, allowing Ketel to take third base, and then a Gurriel sacrifice fly to right, allowed Marte to tag and score. 4-3 Colorado

Then, as he seems to do in just about every start, ERod threw a couple of innings where he demonstrated why, if he could just control his pitches better and not leave stuff out there in the middle of the plate, he could be a really good pitcher. He pitched around a walk and a one-out single in the first, but put up a zero and wound up only throwing 12 pitches, including the zeven-pitch walk to start the inning. And then in the top of the fifth, he sat down the middle of the Rockies’ lineup in order with only seven pitches thrown.

It’s actually really maddening. Of the 27 batters ERod wound up facing, 13 of them only saw one or two pitches in their at bats. That’s often a really bad sign, it seems like, when our pitchers do that, but I think that’s actually part of ERod’s game, when he’s actually pitching well. He throws stuff that hitters think they can tee up on, but because of location or movement or whatever, they wind up making weak contact that produces quick outs. Of course, too often they also turn out to be right about teeing off on those pitches, and he winds up giving up a lot of hits and a lot of runs. But anyway.

The bottom of the fifth started out very nicely, as Carroll took the second pitch he saw from Blalock and sent it unceremoniously over the pool in right center for a very long home run to tie the game:

Marte flied out to center and Perdomo followed with a walk, and with two outs Adrian Del Castillo doubled to center field, scoring Perdomo and giving us what turned out to be a short-lived lead. That was also the end of Blalock’s night, and the beginning of the Rockies bullpen involvement. 5-4 D-BACKS

The Rockies, sadly, tied things back up in the top of the sixth. ERod recorded the first out and then walked the nine-hole batter for the second time in the game, and Torey had came out and got him. In came Juan Burgos, the headliner (?) of the Naylor trade with Seattle. Burgos walked the first batter he faced, and then gave up a seeing-eye single up the middle on what was actually a pretty good pitch, but which allowed the tying run to cross the plate. He buckled down after that, though, and struck out the next two batters on nine pitches total. The kid looked good, too, after he got his nerves under control. It was a nice first look. 5-5 TIE

After that, it was mainly a battle between two substandard bullpens. Three relief arms for Colorado recorded zeroes against us, despite some minimal traffic, in the sixth, seventh, and eighth. For us, Kyle Backhus pitched a scoreless seventh, Andrew Saalfrank a scoreless eighth, and Trade Deadline acquisition (and young man who really needs a beard if he doesn’t want to stop getting carded everywhere he goes) Andrew Hoffman a scoreless top of the ninth.

Which brought us to the very final act, the last chance, all that. A couple of us in the Gameday Thread, at least, were really hoping that this wasn’t gonna go to extras, and while Ketel Marte struck out to start off the frame, Perdomo and Gurriel did not disappoint. Perdomo stroked a double into the gap in right center, and then Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. walked it off with his own double to the gap in left:

Win Probability Added, courtesy of FanGraphs

Big Cheese: Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. (4 AB, 2 H, 3 RBI, 1 K, +33% WPA), Geraldo Perdomo (4 AB, 3 H, 2 R, 1 BB, +25.2% WPA)Cheese: Andrew Hoffman (1 IP, 0 R, 0 H, 1 K, +14% WPA), Andrew Saalfrank (1 IP, 1 H, 0 R, +10.8% WPA)Odiferous Cheese: Eduardo Rodriguez (5? IP, 6 H, 5 ER, 1 HR, 2 K, 5 BB, -16.6% WPA), Alek Thomas (4 AB, 0 H, 2 K, -14.4% WPA)

It was quite the lovely Gameday Thread tonight, with many of the comments actually being game-relevant (not that I mind when they’re not), and 248 comments total at time of writing. A number went pale cantaloupe Sedona Red* tonight, and received equal rec’s, so I’m giving tonight’s CotG to Sneeks, for this timely callback to many peoples’s expressed discomfort with our new cleanup hitter since the departure of Suarez and Naylor:

Goddamn right! Go Lourdes!

* It certainly does look at first glance like Pantone 347 Pale Cantaloupe, but I have consulted with experts in pigment composition and weathering effects and they assure me that that background hue is actually exactly what one would expect Sedona Red to fade to after seven or eight summers baking out in the Arizona summer sun. After all, here at the AZ Snake Pit, verisimilitude is our watchword.

Anywho. Looks like we have a shot to sweep the Rockies out of Chase tomorrow, which would be fun. We’re sending Brandon Pfaadt to the mound, and apparently Colorado is rolling out some gentleman named Tanner Gordon who is relatively new to this pitching thing and currently sports a rather unsightly 6.59 ERA that nevertheless is more than a point better than his career ERA. So we shall see. First pitch is scheduled for 1:10pm AZ time. Hope you can join us!

As always, thanks for reading, and as always, go Diamondbacks!