Rockies players “trust” Kris Bryant. But will Colorado fans?

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — If Kris Bryant put his bat on the ball as quickly as he put a foot in his mouth, there’s no story. No shock, no clean-up, no counter, no spin.

But give the Rockies’ slugger credit for this much. Almost as soon as it was presumed he’d thrown his teammates under a slew of metaphorical buses, Bryant ran out in the middle of traffic, on his own, to try and mitigate the roadkill.

“Before I had to navigate it, he walked through that (office) door,” skipper Bud Black told me, nodding at the pathway to his desk inside the Rockies’ swanky spring training headquarters at Salt River Fields. “He goes, ‘Hey, I want to talk about this article.’”

You know the one. You’ve seen it. But back on March 1, Black still hadn’t. In the most buzz-worthy — and cringe-worthy — nugget to emerge from Rockies camp, Bryant told The Athletic late last month that he didn’t “do as much research into (Colorado’s) prospects as I could.” The $182-million man intimated he was in a rush to get to spring training, to get back to a team and to his routine, in the winter of ’21-22.

“He basically contradicted (to me) how the story portrayed some of his quotes,” Black recalled. “So right then, I knew, ‘Hey, listen, he’s standing up to this.’ And he wanted to address the team. Which he did.

“So from that point on, to me, it was over. He stood up, he handled it, addressed the team. From that point, I knew that there wasn’t any navigation to be done. Because he handled it as a pro and as a teammate.”

When I approached those teammates, they shrugged. New season. Old news.

“I trust Kris,” Rockies ace German Marquez told me over the weekend.

“I don’t want to get too deep in this conversation, but I’ve thrown to that guy. He’s going to be good. He’s going to do it well. (He’s) an amazing guy. And we’ve always got his back as teammates.”