Rockies 9, Cubs 3: A Stinker

Every major-league team, even the best ones, has some games over the course of a 162-game season where, for lack of a better word, they just stink. (Bad teams have more of these than good teams, of course.)

Saturday night's 9-3 Cubs loss to the Rockies was a perfect example of such a game for our favorite team.

From bad pitching to bad at-bats to bad defense (Starlin Castro got called for interference during a rundown play -- that's hard to do), the Cubs didn't really do anything right Saturday.

One thing we learned for sure during this game: if Carlos Villanueva is still a Cub next season, don't let him pitch against the Rockies! Here's an interesting split of Villanueva's for this year:

vs. Rockies: 9 IP, 21 H, 14 ER, 4 BB, 1 K, 3 HR, ERA 14.00, WHIP 2.000
vs. everyone else: 75⅓ IP, 59 H, 25 ER, 22 BB, 59 K, ERA 2.99, WHIP 1.075

Solid pitcher against everyone but Colorado; less-than-replacement-player against the Rox.

So there's that. And Luis Valbuena hit a home run Saturday night.

Meanwhile, Carlos Gonzalez hit yet another home run off Cubs pitching. CarGo is crushing the Cubs over his career: .384/.407/.791 with eight home runs in 86 total at-bats, his highest OPS (1.198) against any team.

Michael Bowden and Hector Rondon provided three scoreless relief innings; this is about the only positive thing I can think of that came out of this awful game. Rondon, in particular, looked very good, throwing just 12 pitches (nine strikes) and striking out two of the three hitters he faced. Maybe there's some hope for Rondon to become a decent big-league reliever after all.

Have you noticed that this recap contains very, very short paragraphs, some of them just one sentence long?

That's because I'm struggling to find anything good to write about this game. Len and JD spent some time eating Rocky Mountain oysters (JD didn't seem to like this at all), and discussing the statistical comparison between Andre Dawson's career and Alfonso Soriano's, finally concluding that, even though their offensive numbers are somewhat similar, Dawson's career was far better due to his excellent outfield defense.

That's all I've got. The Cubs can still win this series; that'd be a nice continuation of what was going on before the All-Star break. It would also break a long streak; the Cubs haven't won a series in Denver since 2004, and are 8-19 at Coors Field since then. Edwin Jackson takes the mound against Tyler Chatwood.