A cool breeze that made it feel much chillier than 53 carried away any aspirations that the home opener would be a perfect day at the park.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fastball command wasn\u2019t there to start. Getting behind in counts against a lineup like that wasn\u2019t gonna set you up for success in the first inning there,\u201d Michael Lorenzen said. \u201cAnd then you include, you know, some hits, some singles through the infield and balls that fall in different things like that. I just gotta do better early on.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Rockies were down 9-0 at one point before no. 9 hitter Kyle Karros had even experienced his first trip to the plate. With last season\u2019s 17-16 walk-off win against the Pittsburgh Pirates on the minds of 48,366 in attendance, Colorado could not mount another improbable comeback against this Pennsylvanian club.<\/p>\n
The offense mustered five hits and one run against Aaron Nola, the fewest in a home opener since getting shutout in 2012. The 15 strikeouts, seven looking, were not what the Rockies were drawing up.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Coupled with 17 strikeouts in their previous game, the 2026 club already did something the 2025 version managed to do twice: strikeout 15+ times in consecutive games.<\/p>\n
Colorado struck out 1,531 times last season, second-most in MLB with the highest strikeout percentage (25.9%) in the sport. Despite a focus on making more contact to put pressure on the defense \u2013 both during the winter with roster acquisitions and in spring training with new hitting coach Brett Pill \u2013 that\u2019s not what came to fruition.<\/p>\n
\u201c(Nola) was really good. He was painting the way, getting us to chase the curveball, mixing well, just keeping us off balance,\u201d manager Warren Schaeffer said. \u201cIn general, we got to be better. In terms of the 15 strikeouts, we\u2019ve got to be consistently better.\u201d<\/p>\n
There were silver linings. Valento Bellozo, promoted from Triple-A Albuquerque the day prior to the home opener, twirled six innings of one-run ball in relief.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A cool breeze that made it feel much chillier than 53 carried away any aspirations that the home…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662613,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2405],"tags":[5,167,52,4316,4,168],"class_list":{"0":"post-662612","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-colorado-rockies","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-colorado","10":"tag-colorado-rockies","11":"tag-coloradorockies","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-rockies"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116346317697988618","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662612\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}