DENVER -- Modern thinking treats pitching as an individual sport. If you pitch well, but bad things happen beyond your control, don’t worry.\n\n
And there was one more self-motivating factor: Tuesday was the third birthday for his son, Thiago. No one was going to take the ball from him before he was done.\n\n“In the eighth inning, Buddy \\[Black\\] talked to me,” Senzatela said of his manager. “‘How you feel?’ he said. I said I feel really good. I feel better now than at the start of the game.\n\n“He said, ‘Be honest with me.’ I said, ‘I’m good; let me finish.’”\n\n
Senzatela forced 14 groundouts and finished at 109 pitches. He struck out the next-to-last hitter, Mark Canha, with a 96.7 mph fastball and enticed Jake Lamb to ground a 95.8 mph heater to end it.\n\nThe first two hitters of the first and second innings reached base, but Senzatela escaped with one run and few pitches spent.
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“You like when the pitch count’s down when there is traffic, so that was a good sign,” Black said. “The A's were aggressive early on some first-pitch swings, and we got some outs. So that helped. But again, I got to give credit to Antonio for making pitches on the first pitch.\n\n“They must have been good enough to hit, or at least looked good enough to hit, for them to swing. That was an indication of his command.”\n\nSenzatela held the Athletics to two runs and six hits over five innings at Oakland on July 28.
Tuesday brought the Rockies’ first complete game since Germán Márquez’s one-hitter at San Francisco on April 24 last season. It was the Rockies’ first at home since
Since Sept. 4, a Rockies starter has pitched at least six innings in five of the 10 games and given up fewer than three runs seven times. But at times the bullpen has faltered, and more times the offense has struggled.