Baseball season is a long, arduous grind

Fear not, Rockies fans: The season is far from over, even if it feels like the sky is falling thanks to Colorado’s eight-game losing streak to close out June.
Right now, the Rockies are playing like a league-average team, but they’re far from it. The numbers across the board, as well as their record, shows that they’re a much better team than they’ve shown in this eight-game slide.
It’s important to remember that prior to the eight-game losing streak, the Rockies ripped of a six-game winning streak that put them at the top of a tough National League West over the surging Los Angeles Dodgers and the Arizona Diamondbacks. Baseball is a long, long season with plenty of highs and lows sprinkled throughout the year, much like what the Rockies are going through right now.
That being said, the recent slide doesn’t signal the end of a fun summer here in Colorado because things can change quickly in the crazy game of baseball.
Sure, the pitching has fallen off in the last week or so, namely Antonio Senzatela and Jeff Hoffman, but that happens at times in a long, grueling season with 162 games in 183 days. It’s a very young staff that is going through growing pains right now, but help is on the way with staff ace Jon Gray expected to be back from the disabled list Friday in Arizona, not to mention the possible upgrades Colorado could make on the trade market this summer: Sonny Gray, Gerrit Cole anyone?
It’s tough to watch the Rockies in this stretch because they’re either getting blown out, or they’re losing close games in the final innings like they did in the last two days against the San Francisco Giants. That’s a far cry from what they were doing earlier in the season when they were bludgeoning teams while getting off to a fast start, posting the second-best record in baseball at one point.
Baseball is a fickle game though, and momentum tends to swing one way or another. I have no doubt that the Rockies will bounce back from this tough stretch of games to point the ship in the right direction before the All-Star break.
Sitting at 47-34 on the year, the Rockies are now 6.5 games back of the red-hot Dodgers, but thanks to the prolific start to the season …
Colorado has plenty of leeway in the Wild Card race, where they are firmly locked into the second Wild Card slot with a six-game lead over the Cubs in that category.
With the recent skid, the Rockies compare favorably to the New York Yankees this season. Both are rather young with breakout stars like Charlie Blackmon and Aaron Judge, or Senzatela and Luis Severino, but both teams have gone through prolonged skids as of late.
You know about the Rockies’ eight-game losing streak, but the Yankees lost six straight games to fall out of first place in the American League East and now sit in the top Wild Card spot as of now.
Being so young and with big stars scattered throughout the lineup, both teams are poised to get hot again, but right now in the dog days of summer, you just sort of have to push through situations like this and take it one day at a time.
Today’s off day before the start of a series in Arizona against the Diamondbacks should be a good chance for the Rockies and manager Bud Black to hit the reset button on the year and get back to what was working.
This is too good of a team to stay in this funk, and it’s too good of a team for fans to be bailing on.
These aren’t the same Rockies of years past; they’ll prove that to the fan base yet again here soon.

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