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I'll open, but it's going to take all hands on deck to Know Your Rockies, who the Mets haven't played since taking the last two of a three-game set in Denver back in September of 2019, when Pete Alonso became the first Met to reach 50 homers. The Mets stopped off to take another two of three in Cincinnati on the way home, and this will be their first trip outside of their time zone since then.
The Rocks have lost five in a row, with one more to play tonight in LA while the Mets fly west. They beat the Dodgers on opening day, but have since lost five in a row to LA, who despite their 10-2 sprint out of the gate, haven't put that much ground between themselves and the division.
But enough about them. We're interested in the Rockies, and, well, that's who the better teams in the division have been getting fat on, leaving the Roxxettes with a league-worst 3-9 record. Bud Black, who has managed more than one loser in his day, is tasked with keeping the squad up through a tough spring.
We don't have an official starter yet for the opener, but I imagine we will shortly. Let's open this thread at catcher.
Number one guy Elias Diaz is a defense-first guy. At least, he better be with a .296 career OBP. He's got a strong beard, strong profile, strong work ethic, and really weak offensive performance, with an .091 batting average and .258 OPS thus far in 2020. If you think a mushier ball is going to hurt the Freddie Freemans of the world, so far it's killing the Elias Diazes. While he has defensive skills, he hasn't really put that together either.
His backup (and soon to be the starter I imagine), is Dominic Nuñez, a lefty-swingig athletic type who was drafted as a schoolboy shortstop. Josh is in his second year in a big league career that he has yet to figure out, but his .187 average is somehow nearly twice that of Diaz, and he's shown some power, so he's bound to get a look.
The truth is that today's snapshot might not be a fair picture of what we'll see this weekend. There's probably a good chance that tonight's finale with Los Angeles triggers a move, perhaps with Diaz DFA'd and the recently released-by-Washington Jonathan Lucroy (a 2017 Rocky) brought in. If I'm Lucroy, I'm on a plane heading west already, just to be ready if a move goes down.
That's enough about vagabond catchers. Who is on first?
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