At least the fans got bobbleheads.
Playing in front of a sold-out crowd at American Family Field for Jackson Chourio bobblehead giveaway day, the Milwaukee Brewers turned in a snoozer.
Freddy Peralta battled in his start and couldn't complete five innings while the Brewers offense was nonexistent for nearly the entirety of the afternoon Sunday in a 4-1 loss to the Colorado Rockies.
Not even every fan in attendance received the Chourio bobble, which was given out only to the first 30,000 in attendance. But every last one of the announced crowd of 42,015 in attendance got an up-close look at one of the most feeble offensive efforts of the year.
After a single from Isaac Collins, who was making his MLB debut, with one out in the second inning, the Brewers didn't put a single runner on base the rest of the way. Twenty-three up, twenty three down.
BOX SCORE: Rockies 4, Brewers 1
There wasn't an argument of unlucky contact or quality of opponent to hang their hats on, either. The Brewers hit seven pop-ups in that stretch and had just one ball with an expected batting average above .180 while facing the second-worst road team in baseball.
Just one of those days.
The Rockies, meanwhile, won only their third road series of the season and took the season series, 4-3, against Milwaukee. In similar vein to Sunday's game, the Brewers capped off an underwhelming 2-4 homestand.
Brewers offense goes absent again
Rhys Hoskins took advantage of a Rockies' mistake in the first, cashing in on a two-out Ryan McMahon error with a RBI single to right, his first run driven in on a non-homer since August 24.
That would be it for the rest of the day in a game where the Brewers offense was quieter than a church mouse.
Kyle Freeland put up zeroes the rest of the way through six innings before passing the ball off to the bullpen, which then strung together perfect seventh, eighth and ninth innings.
This wasn’t the only time this week the Brewers went absent for a lengthy stretch at the end of a game in the past week. It wasn’t even the second time. Or third.
The Brewers went 0 for 21 to finish off an extra-innings loss to the Reds last Sunday. On Tuesday, they finished 1 for 20. Friday against the Rockies, they had a 1 for 16 stretch until snapping out in the seventh.
"It was a tough homestand," Murphy said. "We’ve had games like this, if you look at the St. Louis series, we had games just like this, where once something didn’t go our way, we didn’t produce, we didn’t fight back right after that as well as we usually do."
Murphy's final part of those comments were fascinating; not only did the Brewers' bats disappear down the stretch in four of the last seven games, but their fight, too, wasn't what it has usually been.
"That has not been the case," Murphy said of his team this year. "They could be tired. They could be feeling it. They could be trying too hard. A lot of young players still in there. Everybody goes through swoons. It just seems like this whole week, we’ve really relied on the homer and haven’t played the game."
As second baseman Brice Turang put it: "It’s not like us."
This week has, indeed, been a far cry from what the Brewers have done to this point. But it was nevertheless a missed opportunity against a couple of middling-to-poor teams at home. Milwaukee is now three full games behind Philadelphia for the second and final bye in the National League while also currently not possessing the tiebreaker.
"We have our work cut out for us," Murphy said.
A rough start for Freddy Peralta and a bad pitch from Hoby Milner
Facing one of the worst offenses in baseball, Freddy Peralta labored his way through 4 2/3 innings. The right-hander allowed seven hits and two walks before exiting with one out more out to get in the fifth.
The Rockies had only scored one run to that point, though, despite hitting three doubles and a homer.
But that didn't last long. Pat Murphy went to Hoby Milner with a pair of lefties up and runners on the corners, and the southpaw immediately surrendered a go-ahead three-run homer to Sam Hilliard.
Peralta, in his postgame interview, didn't seem thrilled with being removed.
"I thought that I had more," Peralta said. "That's something that I cannot control."
"He's been so great for us this year," Murphy said of Peralta. "We made a move that we felt was right. Obviously the result of it was not. It hurts, especially when you decide 4 2/3 innings in, high-80s, 90 pitches and you know he can go to 100. But this is a lefty-lefty matchup and a veteran pitcher, and it didn't work out."
Milner has now given up six runs in his last 2 2/3 innings while allowing three of four inherited runners to score in the two most recent showings.
Milner has allowed 17 of 41 inherited runners to score this year.
It was not a great week in terms of results for the two arms the Brewers called up Tuesday when a couple of spots opened up. Milner entered a pair of tie games and immediately allowed the opponent to take the lead, while Elvis Peguero, who threw a scoreless ninth on Sunday, had a rough showing five days prior.
The schedule doesn't get any easier now. Milwaukee heads out to San Francisco for three games beginning Tuesday before visiting the Diamondbacks, one of baseball's hottest teams.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Rockies 4, Brewers 1: Milwaukee's terrible, horrible, no Good, very bad day
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