At The Break

The Rockies stumbled into the All-Star Break 46-50 squandering another good week of pitching (giving up 16 runs in 7 games).  They now find themselves 4.5 games behind the Arizona Diamondbacks and 2 games behind the Dodgers, who look on the verge of running away with this thing if they continue the 17-5 pace they are on since June 21.   As an aside 3 of those 5 losses are to the Rockies.

They won't continue the pace, but will they slump?   Proabably at some point.  The NL West goes into a stretch of 6 weeks where they will predominately play the NL East, NL Central and AL East.  The Diamondbacks go to San Francisco this weekend and will Host the Padres next weekend, which will leave all the West teams with home and home series against everyone else in August and September.

I always start the year believing that 90 wins will win the division.  For the Rockies to achieve that they would need to almost double their win total of 46.  Thus they would need to go 44-22 the rest of the way.  In 2007 and 2009 the Rockies finished their regular season 40-26 in the last 66 games.  Doing that again would put the Rockies at 86-76, possibly enough to win the division.

Following my leading indicator of Road Wins - Home Losses, the Rockies currently are -1.   That number will probably go down in the next 10 days with the home stand coming up.  Arizona currently leads the West with a +3 the only teams that is positive.  LA is -3, SF is -2 and SD is -8.  Also remember that nobody in the west has a winning record on the road.

In the final 2.5 months the Rockies will need to put together a winning run of some sort.  Maybe the 13-4 that they started the season with, but it will require them to have at least one winning road trip of 3 losses or less, combined with a dominant performance at home.  Let's say they can go 22-12 at home the rest of the way....not unreasonable.  They would then need to play above .500 on the Road  maybe 18-14.    

It seems the pitching staff as a whole have learned how to pitch, especially Chacin, DeLaRosa and Chatwood.  If they can have predominately good starts, and the hitting can stay healthy and start producing runs, this team could contend down to the wire.