PHOENIX — If Thursday night’s performance at Chase Field had been a Broadway play, the Rockies’ show would have closed after one performance. Before the reviews even came out.
That’s how bad opening night was for the Rockies, whose third-inning pratfall set a bushel of records and set the stage for a 16-1 loss to the defending National League champion Diamondbacks.
Talk about March Madness. It was Colorado’s worst opening-day defeat, topping a 10-1 loss at Miami on March 31, 2014.
Left-hander Kyle Freeland, making his third opening day start, endured one of the worst games of his career. In a scant 2 1/3 innings, he gave up 10 runs on 10 hits, including a two-run homer to Lourdes Gurriel in the first inning. The 10 runs Freeland surrendered were a career-high.
Freeland departed in the third inning and was relieved by Anthony Molina, making his major league debut. The D-backs pounded Molina for six runs on six hits in one-third of an inning.
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About that third inning: Arizona scored 14 runs, ripped 13 hits, and sent 18 batters to the plate — the most in all categories by Rockies pitching in a single inning in franchise history. The D-backs’ 14 runs were tied for the fourth-most in an inning since 1900.
Before Thursday night, no team had ever allowed 14-plus runs in an inning in its first game of a season. The previous high was way back on April 14, 1925, when the St. Louis Browns allowed 12 runs to Cleveland in the eighth inning.
The Rockies managed just four hits, two coming from Ryan McMahon, who doubled home Brendan Rodgers in the second inning for Colorado’s only run.
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