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While the San Francisco Giants are one of the Rockies’ main foes, there will still be good reason—at least for one day—for Colorado baseball fans to root for the Bay Area’s team as they kick off the regular season.
Colorado native and Regis Jesuit High School alumnus, Ty Blach, will be the starting pitcher for the Giants when they take on the Los Angeles Dodgers today in their opening day game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
The 27-year-old was not who most Giants fans expected to take the mound to start the 2018 campaign, but injuries to pitchers Madison Bumgarner and Jeff Samardzija—plus an untimely spring training start by Johnny Cueto—pushed him to the top of the rotation. Last year, in his second full season in the Majors, Blach posted an 8-12 record with a 4.78 earned run average.
Blach is one of only eight Colorado-born players to see playing time with a Major League team in 2017. Of those eight, seven were pitchers. And of those seven, Blach is one of the most promising. Colorado has a history of producing top-tier pitching prospects including likely hall-of-famer Roy Halladay. Kyle Freeland, an alum of Thomas Jefferson High School and first round pick of the Rockies in 2014, looks to be a key part of the Rockies 2018 season. Another Regis Jesuit alum, David Peterson, was drafted by the New York Mets in the first round of the 2017 MLB draft.
If you’d like to watch Blach pitch this evening, the game will be televised on ESPN at 5 p.m. MST.
(The writer, who knows Blach from high school and college, reached out for comment, but did not receive an answer by press time. He gets it. It’s one of the biggest days of Ty’s life.)
