First stop on the Professor’s USA tour sees me touching down in Denver to visit with Dan Butterly from the Mountain West Conference (our regular Sportzfan Radio contributor) and also take a look at baseball and the New York Mets at Colorado Rockies series played at Coors Field.
The weather has been simply stunning with the sun shining in a cloudless sky and temperatures being in the mid to high 20’s (that’s centigrade) during the day but down to a cool around 5C at night.
After watching game 1 of the series last night (from the Club seats), the Mets were truly unlucky not to have come away with the ‘w’. On two occasions they left bases loaded, managed to strand a total of 10 base runners for the night and were 0 for 7 with runners in scoring position. You won’t win too many games of baseball with those figures, no matter how good the pitching is.
Mets pitcher Chris Capuano did admirably after escaping from a bases loaded jam in the first to make only one further mistake in the 7th inning allowing a line drive home run to left field by the Rockies catcher Chris Iannetta. In pitching 6 2/3 innings, he allowed only 5 hits and in my opinion did enough for a win if the Mets bats had come through for him.
Unfortunately for the Mets, the usually hitter friendly confines of Coors Field were affected by a swirling cross breeze which reduced two sure home run hits from Jason Bay and David Wright to catches made on the warning track. The Mets certainly lack a quality hitter to take the game by the scruff of the neck. I can only hope that in the final two games of the series, the Mets hitters find some pop and can hit a winning score.