Series Recap: Braves At Rockies

Nine times out of ten, if you get a split in a 4-game series on the road, you'd be pretty happy with that. Winning games on the road is hard enough, and having to do it in one city for four straight nights is a bit of a mini-slog when you really think about it. With that being said, the final 2 games of this series were pretty disappointing and ended the series at Coors Field on a dour note for the Braves.

Things started off well enough for Atlanta in this series. Game 1 was the anti-Coors Field game: It ended 3-1, runs were at a premium, and they were made through manufacturing instead of wallball. Chris Johnson was the man in this game, as his 2 RBI ended up being crucial for Atlanta in the victory. Gavin Floyd got credit for the win, which was the first time that he earned credit for the (somewhat meaningless) stat since 2012. Parenthetical aside, it was a pretty happy moment for Floyd, especially considering the bum luck that he had earlier in the season.

If Game 1 was the anti-Coors Field game, then Game 2 was Vintage Coors Field, as both teams couldn't stop scoring, swinging the bats as if their lives depended on scoring runs at a constant rate, as if the game was just one big baseball adaptation of the movie "Speed." The game eventually ended 13-10, with the Braves doing the majority of their damage in the 1st inning, which is when a grand slam by Andrelton Simmons contributed to a huge 7-run inning. The game ended up being a slugfest/dogfight/slugfight (???) that eventually ended with Shae Simmons and Craig Kimbrel restoring order at the end to nail down the 13-10 victory.

From that point forward, the Rockies had complete control of this series, scoring 18 runs to Atlanta's 5. The third game in particular was a big stinger because the Braves had their ace going while the Rockies were starting Tyler Matzek in his big league debut. We have to make sure to give credit where credit is due, and Matzek deserved all of the praise in the world for pitching a gem. With that being said, it was very disappointing to see that the Braves' bats couldn't figure out the debuting youngster, and even more so that Teheran couldn't recover from another bad 1st inning as the Braves lost 8-2.

The Rockies picked up 8 of their 18 runs in 48 hours on Wednesday, and they got the other 10 on Thursday in yet another exhibition of complete dominance. Just as it was the case in the 3rd game of the series, the Braves' bats didn't join in the scoring fun until the 8th inning, and that was also when the game got funky. Gerald Laird was knocked out of the game by an incidental backswing from Corey Dickerson, and inexplicably, David Carpenter took offense. I don't know whether or not Carp actually believed that Dickerson meant to sock Laird (with a backswing, though?!), or if he thought that Dickerson didn't show enough concern. Either way, Carpenter plunking Dickerson for that was extremely shortsighted, and he fully deserved the ejection. So, because this is baseball, Rockies reliever Nick Masset retaliated by hitting Laird's replacement, Evan Gattis, in the bottom of the 9th with 2 outs. He was also rightly ejected, if only because of the fact that plunking someone with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th in a game that you are comfortably winning is pretty dumb in and of itself, "unwritten rules" or not.

Oh, by the way, the Braves lost that one 10-3. That was the 2nd time in 10 days that the Rockies scored 10 runs, and they scored 28 runs over the last 3 games. Considering the state of the Rockies going into this series, that's a pretty bad performance by Atlanta's pitching staff, Coors Field or not. It'll have to improve going forward, and maybe extremely soon considering that Mike Trout and friends are coming to town this weekend, and next week figures to be a pretty big week in the division with a series against the Phillies and a trip to the nation's Capital to face the current leaders in the NL East, the Washington Nationals.

Once again, there are times where a split of a 4-game series on the road is pretty nice. This sure doesn't feel like one of those times. The Colorado series wasn't all bad, but it wasn't exactly all rosy, either.