Coors Field is known for being an offensive haven, a park where no lead is safe until the 27th out is recorded by whichever team wins.
And yet, after being snowed out Friday and then seeing two games of a doubleheader combine for 20 runs Saturday…the Mets got seven scoreless innings from Taijuan Walker and just enough offense to win 2-0 on Sunday and take the series.
Walker entered the game with a 3.52 ERA, so it’s not like he has been floundering most of the season – but he also entered with a career 2.63 ERA at Coors Field, which might make him a Cy Young candidate if he was actually a Rockies pitcher.
"I kind of just know what pitches work here," Walker said. "Talked about it before, and it's the curveball and the splitter are two good pitches here. I was throwing the slider early, but just wasn't getting the swings and misses and action on it. Just stuck with the curveball, fastball, and the splitter today."
Given that the Rockies entered Sunday with the best team batting average in the league and the fourth-best OBP, holding them down (especially at home) is a feat.
"He had everything," manager Buck Showalter said of Walker. "I said a couple times, Orel Hershiser had that great line: 'One to compete, two to win, three to dominate.' He really had four working today, flipped a curveball in there, a slider and a split. And actually threw a changeup, glad we didn't have to go to a sixth pitch with the fingers. He was the difference.”
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How hard is it to not only hold down the Rockies in Colorado, but shut them out, too? The Rockies had scored two or more runs in 84 consecutive games entering this series, but lost two games 5-1 and 2-0.
“It's really hard to shut these guys out period, especially in this ballpark,” Showalter deadpanned. “That was pretty remarkable.”
“I felt like I was just pounding the zone, getting ahead early, 0-1, 0-2," Walker added. "And then when I did get behind, I just let them put the ball in play. Our defense was really, really good today behind me, lot of ground balls, there was some really good plays made today. We have guys who are going to dive for the balls and make every single play. When I get runners on I try to tell myself, ‘ground ball, ground ball get a double-play,’ and that's what we did today."
A huge cap to a big weekend for a Mets rotation that went from one of the best and deepest in the league to searching for answers, as they lost both Tylor Megill and Max Scherzer to injury in the last 10 days and must now send David Peterson, Chris Bassitt, and a TBD to the mound in San Francisco over the next three games.
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