Colorado Rockies: Not even Coors Field can wake up the offense

Everyone would have figured a nice homecoming would be a reward for the Colorado Rockies meh start to the season. Instead, it put a bigger magnifying glass on what may now be a glaring issue.

The Colorado Rockies were practically gifted wins by being scheduled to face the Miami Marlins to start the season, but after scoring 12 runs in the first two games and starting off at 2-0, something odd happened.

No, I’m not talking about the Marlins winning a game – or two – but the Rockies scored 33% of the number of runs they scored the first two games in the next four.

All four of those games they ended up losing.

Starting on the road is never easy, especially when you’re two time zones ahead of Colorado, so maybe this was just a funky start to the season for a promising Rockies team and getting back to Coors Field would do them some good.

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It didn’t.

After a five-game – was six but a game was postponed – homestand, the Rockies were outscored by their opponents 44 to 21 and now are on a five-game losing streak.

Granted, 21 runs in five games is far superior to the 17 they scored during their seven-game road trip, but it is the specifics of their offense which has put the Rockies in this predicament.

Ready for some analytics?

The Rockies are an aggressive hitting team. According to FanGraphs, the team has swung at 49.7 percent of pitches, the most in the league. With that comes a .216 batting average, sixth-worst in the league.

With that, the Rockies have struck out 109 times, fifth-most in the league. They have swung and missed at pitches 13.7 percent of the time, second-most in the league.

Last year should have been a warning sign.

Down the stretch, the Rockies had a chance to claim first place in the NL West but would eventually lose out to the Dodgers in the tie-breaker game.

From that game to their playoff run, they scored a staggering six runs in the five games they played after their first 162.

How they addressed that issue has not factored that much either.

Daniel Murphy went to the Injured List during the first series. His replacement, Ryan McMahon soon followed along with David Dahl, who injured himself Sunday.

So where do you point fingers? The new hitting coach?

Dave Magadan, who was hired in the offseason, had finished his third year with the Arizona Diamondbacks in the same role before he and the organization mutually parted ways.

Magadan was put under a microscope when Arizona’s offense struggled and the news was reported about his ‘tunneling’ theory. Tunneling is the idea of rather than looking for a pitch at a certain part of the plate, you view the pitch right out of the hand in which it is thrown and recognize the angle of how it is coming out of his hand.

It worked early on for the Diamondbacks, but when the team began their months-long collapse, that is when the theory came into question.

Has this theory been continued into the Colorado Rockies organization? Is this the response to the tunneling theory by the Rockies? And just how much longer will the Mile-High faithful have to wait to see the Rockies play like their old selves again?