Box: Fox 54, O'fallon Christian 49

Don’t flip out, Livvy Dunne. Apologies, bayou moms. Paul Skenes may have an LSU girlfriend and an LSU baseball card. He’s still, deep down, a Zoomie at heart. “Anything that I can do, or any of us can do, to bring eyes to the Air Force Academy is good,” Skenes, the Pittsburgh Pirates pitching phenom and former AFA baseball star told a crowded circle of reporters earlier this weekend at Coors Field, where he was supposed to pitch against the Rockies, but won’t. “Especially with how much it affected me.

The Rockies are not counting on Adael Amador to make a huge splash in the big-league pool. They’ll settle for some ripples. For now. They want the 21-year-old second baseman, their No. 1 prospect, to get his feet wet, make some mistakes, and learn. So when he is a full-time major leaguer, he won’t be drowned by expectations. “We want to get him acclimated,” manager Bud Black said.

For a major league player, landing a spot in the All-Star Game is about talent, statistics, popularity, reputation, name recognition and the team you play on. And not necessarily in that order. For the Rockies, who are on pace to lose more than 100 games for the second consecutive season, only the first two aforementioned criteria (talent and statistics) will come into play this season.

Trust a team with Dick Monfort in charge and a dinosaur for a mascot to get accused of being stuck in the Stone Age. Full disclosure: The kids upstairs in the Grading The Week cubicles are a heck of a lot better at Strat-O-Matic than they ever were at hitting a curveball.

First, the Nuggets went two and ’que in the playoffs. Does that mean they are one-and-done when it comes to NBA titles? When the postseason began, Denver harbored aspirations of a dynasty. It has been the posture of the front office to take a macro view, focused on winning multiple crowns over a swath of time. There is no denying this wider-lens philosophy cost them in May.

Ryan Feltner knew it the nanosecond that Jack Suwinski clobbered his hanging 2-2 curveball. He’d made a big mistake. The Rockies’ right-hander contorted on the mound in frustration while Suwinski watched his two-run homer soar 459 feet to right to stretch the Pirates’ lead to 4-1 in the seventh inning. Pittsburgh went on to win, 5-2, in front of a Friday night crowd of 31,717 at Coors Field. The Rockies have lost four straight in LoDo for the first time all season. “I thought all of my pitches were generally working,” Feltner said.