DENVER –– The Dodgers lost back-to-back games to the Colorado Rockies this weekend.
One of them came with some eyebrow-raising claims.
On Saturday night, after the Rockies ambushed Dodgers reliever Will Klein with early swings in a go-ahead, two-run, sixth-inning rally, catcher Dalton Rushing said something about the inning felt “fishy” in the moment.
“I think they had a good game plan as the opposing team, and maybe I pitched into their game plan as far as calling pitches,” said Rushing, the team’s second-year backup catcher. “I’m not 100 percent sure. I think it’s odd that some of those hitters that do what they do, they go up there and they’re on the first pitch that was thrown. So it’s a little fishy, but I’ll wear it.”
Just as a controversy might have been brewing, however, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts was rather definitive in squashing the narrative the following afternoon.
“I saw some bad breaking balls,” he said when asked about Rushing’s comments Sunday. “So, I don’t think there was anything fishy behind it. I think there were some bad pitches.”
Indeed, in hindsight, Roberts’ explanation seems more likely than Rushing’s.
During the sixth inning in question, when the Rockies led off with a double, a single and a two-run double against Klein to take the lead in their eventual 4-3 win, all three of Klein’s pitches that were hit were sliders or sweepers left in the strike zone.
Only one came on a first-pitch swing, with Ezequiel Tovar smoking a ground-ball single off a center-cut sweeper. The only two hitters actually took the first pitch, with Hunter Goodman hitting his double on a 1-0 sweeper up in the zone and Troy Johnston plating two runs by pulling an 2-1 slider on the inner edge of the plate into the right-center field gap for a go-ahead double.
“I thought tonight his sweeper, the feel for spin wasn’t good,” Roberts said of Klein after the game. “He didn’t have it, and I think a couple of those hits early were just cement mixers that just didn’t do anything. If that’s the elements, I don’t know how much he’s pitched here. But yeah, tonight, it just wasn’t sharp.”
Klein, of course, hasn’t been the only Dodgers pitcher this series to struggle with the high-altitude complications that come with pitching at Coors Field.
On Sunday, Blake Treinen blew a seventh-inning lead in disastrously similar fashion. He gave up four-straight hits, including a go-ahead two-run homer, to each of his first four batters. All of them came against his trademark sweeper, of which three were in the zone and two were over the heart of plate.
“I just didn’t execute good enough, obviously, if you look at some of the swings,” said Treinen, who hadn’t allowed a run this season before Sunday. “I’ve been really happy with how the year’s been going. I’m not really going to dwell on one game.”
After all, he added, “Colorado isn’t an easy place to play.”
Nothing fishy about that claim.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
