DENVER — The ball left Colin Rea’s hand and didn’t come back the way he needed it to. Hunter Goodman knew it before it landed. So did the 27,000 people at Coors Field on Tuesday night who watched the Colorado Rockies catcher drive a two-run homer into the seats in the first inning, setting a tempo the Chicago Cubs never found an answer for in a 7-3 Colorado victory.
But the moment that will last longer than any box score belonged to someone else entirely. In the fifth inning, Cole Carrigg — a 22-year-old outfielder who had never played a major league game before Tuesday — ripped a triple down the right-field line, slid into third, and then got up and danced. Not a polite shuffle. A dance. The third-base coach watched, the Rockies dugout erupted, and for a brief, weightless moment the 25-42 team at the bottom of the NL West looked like the most fun group in baseball.
That is the thing about a debut that works. It doesn’t just matter to the player. It reorients everyone around him.
Carrigg, Colorado’s fourth-ranked prospect, was promoted earlier Tuesday and inserted directly into the starting lineup in center. He finished 1 for 3 with a walk — clean numbers, nothing gaudy — but the triple was the kind of sensory event that fills a dugout back up. The Rockies had been swept at home by Milwaukee last week. Before Carrigg arrived in the clubhouse, the conversation was about a four-game losing streak and a roster still searching for a reason to believe in itself.
Colorado’s 25th win of the season arrived Tuesday night. Last year, during a campaign that flirted seriously with the worst record in major league history, the Rockies didn’t reach that number until July 22. The calendar reads June 9. The gap is not small.
Tomoyuki Sugano gave the Rockies what they needed most: length. The 36-year-old right-hander, who spent 12 seasons in Japan before reaching the majors, worked into the sixth inning and allowed three runs on eight hits. He struck out three, walked two, and gave his bullpen — which had been stretched thin across the losing streak — a night to breathe. Sugano improves to 6-4. Whether his 3.98 ERA fully reflects his sustainability at altitude remains an open question his peripheral numbers keep raising, but Tuesday was a win and he earned it.
Edouard Julien drove in three runs. Ezequiel Tovar hit a home run. Goodman, who now has five home runs in June alone and is building a case for an All-Star selection, finished with two RBIs. The Rockies posted 12 hits as a team and went 2 for 11 with runners in scoring position — a figure that would look ugly in a loss but barely registered in the context of seven runs.
For Chicago, this was a continuation of something that no longer feels like a slump.
The Cubs entered Tuesday having lost 20 of their previous 27 games. They came into Denver as favorites on the moneyline. They left with Colin Rea charged with seven runs in 4.2 innings, an offense that went 0 for 8 with runners in scoring position, and a record that reads 34-33 — just barely above water after a 10-game winning streak in May made everyone briefly believe this team had turned a corner. ESPN reported Goodman’s homer sparked the Rockies from the opening at-bat.
Alex Bregman, who signed a five-year, $175 million contract in the offseason and is hitting .242, had publicly taken responsibility for Chicago’s offensive struggles on Sunday. He went 2 for 3 with a sacrifice fly Tuesday — the kind of boxscore line that appears after a team has already fallen behind by five runs. Seiya Suzuki drove in a run. Michael Busch hit a solo homer in the sixth. The Cubs scored three times against a Rockies pitching staff that CBS Sports noted carries the worst ERA in baseball. That sentence is not supposed to be possible.
Since May 1, Chicago ranks 25th in the majors in runs scored and its .219 team batting average belongs among the worst in the game. Pete Crow-Armstrong, the best hitter on the roster by average at .258, went hitless in five plate appearances Tuesday. Nico Hoerner and Ian Happ combined to go 1 for 8. What was supposed to be a deep, veteran lineup has instead become one of the league’s most reliable question marks at the midpoint of the season.
Whether the Cubs can find their way back to the team that won 10 straight before this stretch is not something anyone in the organization has offered a convincing answer to. Manager Craig Counsell’s comments after recent losses have grown incrementally shorter. The games have not.
Wednesday night at Coors, Chicago sends Shota Imanaga (4-6, 4.74 ERA) to the mound against Colorado’s Michael Lorenzen (2-8, 8.01). On paper, it should be a Cubs advantage. The Associated Press noted the Cubs were also favored Tuesday, in a stadium where every ERA inflates and the home team had just lost four straight. Coors Field has a way of making paper arguments look naive.
Cole Carrigg will be in the lineup again Wednesday. Whether he dances again is a separate question. Whether the Rockies keep playing like a team that finally remembered it has something to prove is the one that matters.
