Game #136, Diamondbacks vs. Rockies

Jorge De La Rosa LHP, 13-9, 4.19

Chase Anderson RHP, 7-6, 3.90

Charlie Blackmon - CF	Ender Inciarte - CF
DJ LeMahieu - 2B	Cliff Pennington - 3B
Justin Morneau - 1B	Aaron Hill - 2B
Nolan Arenado - 3B	Mark Trumbo - LF
Corey Dickerson - LF	Jordan Pacheco - 1B
Brandon Barnes - RF	David Peralta - RF
Charlie Culberson - SS	Tuffy Gosewisch - C
Jackson Williams - C	Didi Gregorius - SS
Jorge De La Rosa - LHP	Chase Anderson - RHP

And so the Diamondbacks come to the last game of August, needing victory to avoid this turning into the worst month of the season. We were 9-19 through the end of April, and we go into this afternoon's contest with an 8-18 record. There's no question what the cause is: an offense which has delivered the most putrid calendar month, by team OPS, in franchise history. Our line for August is .220/.288/.332, a .620 OPS. To put that into context, Willie Bloomquist's career OPS is .665. We're also currently sitting at 3.27 runs per game, and need to score more than four today, or that will end as the lowest rate since the horrors of July 2004 (88 runs in 28 games, a 3.14 rate).

Hard to feel too optimistic, looking at that line-up, and de la Rosa has been pretty decent, in particular by the low standards of Colorado Rockies pitching in 2014. I say that, but we are one Jake Lamb swing away from having scored one run in the first two games of the series. Again, this is less a glowing compliment to the opposition, than an indictment of how bad our hitters have been this month. We certainly need Anderson to be better than he has been in his last couple of starts, allowing 10 earned runs in only seven innings of work, with a K:BB ratio of 7:7. The curse of me writing something optimistic, strikes again...