Wins have been scarce for the Colorado Rockies — and their starting pitchers.
Cal Quantrill has one of the rotation’s two victories, and he will shoot for another when Colorado wraps up a three-game series against the San Francisco Giants on Thursday in Denver.
Quantrill (1-3, 4.31 ERA) will face San Francisco’s Keaton Winn (3-4, 4.41) in a matchup of right-handers as the Giants aim for a sweep.
San Francisco won the first two games, 5-0 on Tuesday and 8-6 on Wednesday, to bounce back from a four-game losing streak. The Giants have won 40 of their last 53 meetings with their NL West rivals.
San Francisco has received good starting pitching and its offense has produced in the first two games, a trend it hopes continues.
Winn will try to bounce back from his toughest start of the season. He tossed at least five innings in each of his first six outings before lasting just two-thirds of an inning at Philadelphia on Saturday. He yielded five runs on four hits and two walks.
The 26-year-old Iowa native has faced Colorado twice last year in his debut season, going 1-0 with a 5.40 ERA. One of those outings occurred in Denver.
San Francisco’s offense helped the first two starters in the series despite the absence of Jorge Soler. The slugger landed on the 10-day injured list on Wednesday, retroactive to Sunday, due to a right shoulder strain.
“It had been like three days since I had played, so the manager and I spoke and the manager felt that it wasn’t right to keep asking me (how I felt) every day,” Soler said through an interpreter. “So I guess the best course of action for me was to go on the IL and bring somebody else up.”
Heliot Ramos was that someone else. He was recalled from Triple-A Sacramento on Wednesday to take Soler’s roster spot and delivered a hit in his 2024 major league debut on Wednesday. That was one of 13 hits for San Francisco, which had 10 hits on Tuesday.
The Rockies’ offense had been dormant until breaking out with six runs in the Wednesday loss. In the four games prior to that, Colorado scored a total of six runs and was shut out twice.
Wednesday was just the second time in 10 games the Rockies scored more than four runs — and they dropped both of those contests. Colorado has lost four in a row and nine of the past 10.
“We strung a couple of innings together,” Rockies manager Bud Black said after the latest defeat. “Another big hit at a couple of different times, it would have been a little bit more interesting. We couldn’t come through with bases loaded and one out (in the fifth), that would have been nice to get one more hit to add on to the two runs.”
Even if the offense can keep it going, the Rockies will need Quantrill to come close to his performance in Pittsburgh on Saturday, when he threw 7 2/3 scoreless innings for his first win with Colorado. He struck out nine, issued no walks and allowed only three hits.
Quantrill has faced the Giants four times in his career, all starts, going 2-0 with a 3.10 ERA.
–Field Level Media
