DENVER -- Left-handed pitcher Kyle Freeland showed up at Rockies manager Warren Schaeffer’s office admitting that being thrown out of his last start -- with no outs in the top of the first inning in Tuesday night’s loss to the Giants -- was more than wrong.
“Very, very stupid and selfish, and it hurt my team,” Freeland said Friday night, after righting himself by pitching one of the best games of his career -- a career-high-tying 10 strikeouts and two hits yielded in eight innings of the Rockies’ third shutout of the season, a 3-0 win over the Padres at Coors Field.
Schaeffer’s goal of the brief conversation was more than accepting Freeland’s mea culpa. He wanted to understand Freeland’s motivation for accusing the Giants’ Rafael Devers of “disrespectful” preening about his home run so early in a game in the Rockies’ home park -- and touching off the emptying of both benches and bullpens onto the field for confrontation.
Schaefer emerged from the talk backing the attitude his pitcher showed. Against the Padres, Freeland rewarded Schaeffer and the club.
“‘Free’ is a really, really good leader,” Schaeffer said. “Anytime that you can lead by example, especially when it’s the right thing to do, it’s fantastic. The boys look at him. They do because he’s been around for so long, and he competes at a certain level every night that he’s out there. They feed off him. That’s obvious.”
Freeland said he didn’t carry his beef with the Giants into Friday.
“It’s another start for me,” Freeland said after watching Victor Vodnik overcome a walk and a hit in the ninth to earn his seventh save. “It’s a little different, doing it on two days’ rest. The Padres came to town. I game planned for the Padres and went and tried to beat the Padres. That’s what we did.”
It was hard, though, not to see more in Freeland’s performance.
The Rockies are 40-101 with the Majors’ youngest roster. They’re much better in the second half, as Schaeffer has pushed learning while moving forward and pushing their way to the topsoil of a start that evoked research of some of the worst teams in MLB history.
But as this team grows, it can take a page from their ninth-year pitcher and begin signaling that the Rockies will be pushing back. To truly retaliate, the Rockies have to start winning. Friday’s was their third win in the last 12 games and made them 2-5 on the current nine-game homestand.
“I don’t know about other guys, but that fired me up,” said catcher Hunter Goodman, whose third-inning home run off Nick Pivetta gave him 28, tying Wilin Rosario’s 2012 club record for homers by a player who is primarily a catcher. “I thought we needed something like that to get us going. We were having a rough stretch for the last two weeks. It helped fire us up.”
The Giants were critical of Freeland, with pitcher Logan Webb saying Freeland “runs his mouth a lot of times.” Freeland emerged unbothered and heartened by the Rockies’ response.
“Not everyone’s gonna like every team, individual, whatever,” he said. “Sometimes competition spills over into something that you don’t want to happen, but it happens.
“It’s part of the game, and we came out of that as a group backing me, backing each other as a group -- ‘Schaeff’ backing all of us, backing me. It was good -- a learning point.”
Freeland is more focused on a strong finish to an inconsistent season.
Three of his last six starts have been strong -- 7 1/3 scoreless innings of a shutout of the Cardinals on Aug. 12, six three-run innings of a loss at Houston on Aug. 28 and Friday night. That was interspersed with two losses affected by a blistering problem on his left middle finger, and Tuesday’s start that ended in ejection. He has dealt with low back stiffness in June and illness that rendered him ineffective during two July starts.
Pain- and anger-free, Freeland was technically sound.
Freeland could place his fastball in all areas of the strike zone, and the knuckle curve was a putaway pitch. All but one of his strikeouts occurred in the first five innings, so he was able to stretch to eight by putting batters away quickly.
Freeland finished one out short of his longest career outing, but understood when Shaeffer removed him after the eighth at 88 pitches -- with the oddness of the week factoring into the decision.
Heading into a contract year in 2026 (with a vesting option for ‘27), Freeland is working to have his form match his fire.
“We made some adjustments with my pitch mix and my mechanics over the past couple of months or so that I really feel good about -- that I can carry into the rest of the season and the offseason,” Freeland said.