LAS VEGAS – The right fielder was already warming up in the bullpen when the eighth inning started, because there was nobody left. By then, Carlos Cortes had watched three Colorado Rockies pitchers cycle through his Athletics lineup and every reliever on the roster had either already pitched or been burned in a fire that started in the second inning and didn’t stop until it had consumed a franchise record.
Cortes – an outfielder by trade – walked to the mound at Las Vegas Ballpark on Sunday and became the most effective A’s pitcher on the day, holding the Rockies to a single run and three hits over the final 1 2/3 innings. It was the most quietly poignant detail of an afternoon that will live in Colorado record books: on a day when the Rockies scored 23 runs on 24 hits and hit six home runs in a 23-9 romp, the best arm the A’s could put on the mound came from a position player.
That is how complete the dismantling was. And yet the A’s, who finish this Las Vegas homestand at 4-2 and sit at 35-36 overall – legitimately within reach of a Wild Card spot – will board a plane for West Sacramento more concerned about their pitching depth than any existential crisis. The Rockies are 27-45 and last in the National League West. This was what it looked like when the worst team in baseball had, as manager Warren Schaeffer put it, a big-time outlier of a day.
The number that matters for Colorado’s record books is 23 – more runs than any other MLB team has scored in a single game this entire season, and more than the Rockies had ever put up in 33 years of franchise history. The prior record, 22, was set against Houston on Sept. 25, 2011. They came within one hit of matching the franchise mark of 25 set that same day.
Willi Castro was the instrument. He finished 4-for-6 with seven RBIs, including a two-run homer in the second inning that opened the scoring for Colorado and a grand slam off Scott Barlow in the eighth that finished it. In between, the Rockies sent 10 batters to the plate in a six-run fifth inning that broke whatever was left of the A’s resistance.
Hunter Goodman was the other story. He went 5-for-6 – a career-high – with two home runs and four RBIs, one hit shy of the cycle. The Colorado catcher also drove in a run with a single and scored twice. Kyle Karros had four hits as well, and every starter in the Rockies lineup recorded at least one hit and crossed home plate at least once. Troy Johnston added a home run and four RBIs. TJ Rumfield went deep. Even Eiberson Castellano, a pitcher making his major league debut out of the bullpen, contributed three scoreless innings to earn the save – the first of his career, on the first day of it.
It bears saying what Tomoyuki Sugano’s line looked like: seven wins, four losses, the starter credited with the victory despite surrendering nine hits and eight runs in five innings. He allowed a two-run single to Cortes in the first inning before Colorado began its counter-assault. In a normal game, eight runs allowed in five innings is a disaster. On this afternoon, it didn’t come close to mattering.
For the A’s, there were individual bright spots that the scoreline obscures. Zack Gelof extended his hitting streak to 18 games. Tyler Soderstrom and Max Muncy homered. Lawrence Butler collected three hits. Jeffrey Springs, the starter who absorbed the most damage, at least showed his strikeout stuff – five punchouts in four innings – even if he gave up seven hits and eight runs, six of them earned. What Springs couldn’t solve was a Rockies offense that the Las Vegas desert seemed to supercharge.
The outdoor ballpark in the Nevada heat – 101 degrees at first pitch, the wind blowing out, the high-altitude air of the desert thinning every fly ball’s arc – has become an unofficial stress test for what major league baseball will look like when the A’s move to Las Vegas full time in 2028. Their new $2 billion stadium on The Strip will be enclosed, climate-controlled, indoors. Last week, the Brewers and Athletics played a 15-14, 12-inning game at this same park that featured 11 home runs and 34 combined hits. The teams involved in this six-game homestand combined to score more than 100 runs. Whether the roof solves that or merely relocates the spectacle is a question Goodman himself said he can’t yet answer.
“I’ll be curious to see how it plays,” Goodman said. “I think time will tell. With it being indoors, I don’t know if it will play the same or not.”
Schaeffer, for his part, was careful about what the afternoon meant and didn’t mean. The Rockies had shown flashes of this offensive capability before – most recently in Cole Carrigg’s debut at Coors Field – but the record-setting blowout ended a three-game losing streak and came in a series the A’s still won, two games to one. “I don’t foresee a game like this ever,” Schaeffer told reporters in Las Vegas, “because this is a big-time outlier.”
That is probably true. The Rockies are 27-45. Their rotation opens next week with Michael Lorenzen, who is 2-8 with a 7.54 ERA. The franchise record for runs will likely stand for some time, not because this team is suddenly dangerous but because historically explosive games at Las Vegas Ballpark require a particular alignment of heat, wind, and a roster that, for one afternoon, refuses to make an out.
The A’s return to West Sacramento on Monday, where J.T. Ginn faces the Pittsburgh Pirates. Soderstrom’s earlier heroics in this Las Vegas homestand had kept the A’s winning streak alive, and the team’s 4-2 homestand record at Las Vegas Ballpark is the kind of thing a front office notices when it is building a case for a permanent home. What Sunday offered instead was a preview of the afternoons that could come when the roof stays open too long, or the visiting pitcher throws one too many fastballs into the desert sky.
What remains unresolved is whether the scoreline reflects anything real about either team’s trajectory. The Rockies broke a franchise record and still lost the series. The A’s gave up 23 runs and remain four games above .500. The game that Cortes pitched in the eighth – efficient, unbothered, utterly wasted – may be the most honest single-inning summary of what Sunday actually was.
