Rockies 13, Cubs 6: Another Coors Field special

The Cubs scored six runs in Tuesday’s game. Entering action Tuesday, the Cubs were 22-6 when scoring six or more runs.

So they won, right?

Well, no. First, this is a very different Cubs team than the one that put up that 22-6 record. Second... Coors Field, where the Rockies entered the game with a 33-20 record, one of the best home records in all of baseball.

So the 13-6 Rockies win over this depleted Cubs team was perhaps expected, if a bit depressing.

I’m not going to write a traditional recap of this game because, well, what you’ve read above sums things up pretty well.

Rather, I’ll just post a few highlights and thoughts about the contest and I’m going to start with Zach Davies.

There are games this year where Davies threw well, particularly in the combined no-hitter against the Dodgers. This wasn’t one of those games. Instead, this was another one of those games where Davies ran long counts and hitters fouled a lot of baseballs off and when Davies then got into the strike zone, baseballs were hit a long way off him. He threw only 37 strikes in 66 pitches, two of those strikes left the yard and honestly, I will not miss Davies when he’s gone.

Regarding ball-and-strike calls, David Ross got himself tossed in the second inning [VIDEO].

It wasn’t the pitch right before the ejection that had Ross worked up — that one was a strike, if borderline. It was these three pitches in the first inning. First, pitch 1 to Rafael Ortega:

Then, pitch 6 to David Bote, on which he was called out on strikes:

And in the second inning, pitch 2 to Patrick Wisdom:

All together now: Bring on the robot umpires!

The Cubs scored first on an RBI groundout by Jason Heyward (seriously, you don’t really want to see that, do you?) but then Davies got himself in trouble in the bottom of the second and Elias Diaz wound up hitting a grand slam, giving the Rox a 4-1 lead.

Ian Happ homered in the fourth to make it 4-2 [VIDEO].

Happ has now homered twice in the last week. Baby steps, I guess.

But then Davies served up a three-run homer to Sam Hilliard in the bottom of the inning to make it 7-2.

You know, if the Cubs bullpen had been able to hold things there, the Cubs might have gotten back into this game. But Michael Rucker served up four runs to the Rockies in just 1⅔ innings and later, Rex Brothers allowed another two and that was far more than enough.

The Cubs scored a pair in the eighth. Ortega singled with one out and advanced to second on defensive indifference. Willson Contreras singled him in [VIDEO].

Then, a double by Bote scored Contreras [VIDEO].

In the ninth, Happ walked and one out later, Heyward doubled him in [VIDEO].

Heyward advanced to third on a groundout and then scored on a balk [VIDEO].

On the broadcast, Jim Deshaies put forth something that’s popular in some baseball circles, to wit, the balk should be eliminated. I’m kind of an agnostic on that; the reason the balk was created in the first place was so that baserunners wouldn’t be “deceived” by slight movements by pitchers, who could then throw them out easily. But balks are pretty rare in MLB today anyway. There have been just 99 balks called all season, a bit more than three per team. A former umpire named Bob Davidson was nicknamed “Balkin’ Bob” because he had a penchant for calling them:

He was known in the 1990s as the hair-trigger enforcer of the balk rule ... to the point where his crew was credited by one publication with about a third of all the balks called in the National League over a five-year period from 1993 to 1997.

Hey, would you rather discuss the result of this game or balks? (The latter might be more interesting.)

This is what we’ve been reduced to.

I know there’s another Cubs topic you probably want to discuss today and that’s the comments made by Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts on the Marquee Sports Network pregame show Tuesday. I’m going to have a separate article on this topic coming up at 9 a.m. CT.

In the meantime, there is another Cubs game Wednesday evening in Colorado. Alec Mills will start for the Cubs and Jon Gray is the scheduled starter for the Rockies. Game time is again 7:40 p.m. CT and TV coverage will be via Marquee.