Eli Whitney | May 19, 2026
It was a cold, wet Monday night at Coors Field – 16,126 fans, a soggy infield, and a Rockies team that needed something to feel good about after losing six straight series. They got it. Jose Quintana navigated five-plus innings against a Rangers lineup that kept finding ways to chip away, Sterlin Thompson recorded his first major league hit in the fourth inning, and Juan Mejia slammed the door in the ninth to give Colorado a 7-6 win in the series opener. The Rockies improve to 19-29.
The offense did its work early and often. Ezequiel Tovar doubled home two runs in the first to give Colorado an immediate 2-0 lead off MacKenzie Gore, who lasted just one inning before leaving with left lat tightness – the shortest start of his career. Two more runs scored in the third on a pair of Rangers errors. Brenton Doyle and TJ Rumfield each drove in runs in the fourth to push the lead to 6-1. Braxton Fulford, recalled from Triple-A earlier in the day, stole two bases – the first multi-stolen base game of his career and one of four times all-time a Rockies catcher has accomplished the feat.
“Started the first inning just doing what we talked about – taking your walks, passing the baton to the next guy,” Warren Schaeffer said. “I thought we did that all night.”
Quintana was steady if not dominant. He worked 5.2 innings, allowed three earned runs, and kept the Rangers from doing any real damage until Justin Foscue hit a 425-foot solo home run in the fifth to make it 6-2. Foscue had been something of a non-factor in his major league career to this point – three extra base hits total entering Sunday – but finished 3-for-3 with two doubles, a home run, and three RBI. Most of the other damage against Quintana came on soft contact, and Texas’s ability to string together hits late in his outing.
“He just has a knack for avoiding big innings and avoiding hard contact,” Schaeffer said. “He knows how to pitch, he knows how to stay off barrels. There’s an art to it, and he has it.”
The moment that will define Monday, however small in the context of the win, came in the fourth inning, Sterling Thomson lined a single to shortstop off Peyton Gray – a clean, hard-contact hit that brought Coors Field to its feet and gave the Colorado dugout something to celebrate. It was the first major league hit for the Longmont, Colorado native. “I grew up watching the Rockies since I was seven years old,” Thompson said after the game. “Six months after I was born, I moved to Florida, but I always watched the Rockies. All the history behind it – it’s awesome that I got to do it in Denver too.” The celebration in the clubhouse afterward, he said, lived up to the moment. “That was the craziest beer shower I’ve ever had,” he said with a grin. “Just everything in there. It lived up to the expectation.”
The bullpen nearly let the lead slip away. Victor Vodnik came on in the eighth with a 7-3 lead and allowed three runs without recording an out – a bases-loaded situation that left Jaden Hill’s earlier 1.1 scoreless innings feeling suddenly fragile. Brennan Bernardino came in to stabilize, stranding runners and getting through the inning with the lead intact at 7-6. Then Mejia, who Schaeffer had been trying to protect given his recent workload, came out for the ninth in the cold and closed it out. “With all that in mind, his shutting the door on a cold night like that, when the momentum was clearly in their favor – that’s big time from Juan,” Schaeffer said. “That’s just what Juan does. He’s calm and collected all the time. Nothing gets to him.”
The Rockies have now won four straight series openers against Texas at Coors Field and are 10-4 this season at home when their starter goes at least five innings. That number tells the story – this team is capable of winning when the starting pitching holds, and the bullpen is mostly reliable when it isn’t being asked to do too much. Monday night has both. It was enough.
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