The Colorado Rockies are stumbling through September, and Monday night brought another hit they didn’t need. What started as a tense, back-and-forth game against the San Diego Padres at Coors Field ended the same way so many of their recent nights have ended: with another loss, this one an 8-7 defeat that stretched their skid to eight straight.
The result was bad enough on its own. Then came the injury news.
Hunter Goodman, the two-time All-Star catcher, left in the seventh inning after hurting his thumb on a headfirst slide into third base during the sixth. Goodman was 2-for-3 with a walk before exiting, and the problem didn’t fully register until he came back out and made a throw to second after catching Blas Castaño’s warmup pitches. That’s when he knew something wasn’t right, and Warren Schaeffer pulled him from the game.
“My right hand, my thumb, got caught on the bag, and I don't really know what happened after that,” Goodman said, per Owen Perkins of MLB.com. “When I dove, I thought my right hand was going to slide past the bag and not touch it, and my right thumb kind of just hit the side.”
Brett Sullivan stepped in behind the plate, and now the Rockies will wait for more tests on Tuesday before getting a better sense of Goodman’s status. Through 129 games this season, he’s hitting .245/.312/.529 with 38 home runs and 81 RBIs. The home run total is already a career high, and he’s just 10 RBIs away from matching the career-best mark he set in 2025.
For Colorado, the timing couldn’t feel much worse. The club had spent parts of this year trying to avoid a fourth straight 100-loss season, and there was at least some momentum after major offseason changes that brought in Paul DePodesta as president of baseball operations and Josh Byrnes as general manager. But the Rockies entered Monday already reeling from a seven-game losing streak that included sweeps by the New York Yankees and Detroit Tigers on a recent road trip.
Now they’re just trying to make it to the end. Their season wraps up Sept. 27 against the Chicago White Sox in the Windy City, and this latest setback only adds to what has been a brutal month in Denver.
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For Rockies watchers, though, the most interesting note may be catcher Jack ODowd, whose bat has stood out in the system and earned him a spot on a roster built to test prospects against advanced competition. Catchers tend to draw extra attention in the Fall League because the workload is demanding and the evaluation is so layered, and ODowd now has a chance to show how his offensive game plays against some of the best young arms in the sport. [Read more 🡒]