Best of BP 2025: I Dare You To Root for the Colorado Rockies

Imagine, if you will, a man, a fella, in fact, carrying a weather-worn briefcase, the sort from which you know very little good can appear. This gent is bedraggled and distracted, perhaps a bit deranged. He marches forward, directly towards you—how wonderful—with the eagerness and gleam of a salesman, the sly cunning air reminiscent of the 1920s hobo subculture, and the campfire-roasted-beans aroma also of the 1920s hobo subculture.

I am that man. And no, I’m not here to sell you anything or to solicit canned beans. I have plenty at the moment, some might say too many. What I offer carries no charge.

I am here to make a case:

You should root for the Colorado Rockies. In fact, I dare you.

Maybe not—okay, certainly not—as your all-time favorite team, your top-tier fandom team. Please continue to root for the franchise you were born into. I won’t mind. But I insist you also, at least academically, at least tangentially, root for the Rockies. Root for them the same way you root for good traffic on the commute home or niece-perfect LEGO set options for Christmas shopping. Root with a dispassionate corner of your eye, sure, but root nonetheless.

Because the Rockies are terrible, and they are perfect. They are all that can go right about baseball, even if they’re getting it all wrong right now.

The Grim, Horrible Setup

The Colorado Rockies have won just two games in September this year. They have a -402 run differential, 200 runs clear of the next-closest team (the Nationals). They crossed the 100-loss barrier on September 2, and haven’t showed up to the ballpark as a winning team since April 2… of the 2023 season.

Over the past eight days, the Dodgers beat them 9-0 and the Padres beat them 11-3—with both blowouts happening in Southern California, not within the homer-happy confines of downtown Denver. They have only six players with double-digit home runs, and only two above 20 homers. They have only three hitters above a 100 DRC+, and none above 115 DRC+ (min. 100 PA). Consider for a moment: that there are 134 batters with a 115 DRC+ or more in the league, 4.5 per team, and the Rockies haven’t lucked into just even one such batter over a wild 100 PA sample.

It is not a good offense. But it is also a bad pitching staff. And a terrible defense.

It’s not just that the Rockies are bad. There are always bad teams out there. That’s the way sports leagues work. It’s how they’re bad, and it’s the context of struggles. Those are the reasons their ineptitude hurts so much. And it’s a big reason why, paradoxically, we must root for them to be better; we need them to be better.

How They Are Bad: They Can’t Pitch

Watching a Rockies game—and rooting for the Rockies during that same game—is a harrowing experience. Their league-worst 6.04 ERA doesn’t paint the complete picture. No, they are even worse than that. Why? Because their starting pitchers have a 6.64 ERA – good for a league-worst-and-its-not-close 138 ERA-, which adjusts for their infamous ballpark. Their starting rotation is 38% worse than the average opposing starting pitcher:

Games are over before the 5th inning. There is nothing more deflating than that. In both aforementioned blowouts, the Rockies were losing by 4 runs already by the bottom of the 3rd inning. Here is a plot of the average runs allowed by inning:

The Rockies are giving up almost a full run per fifth inning, that critical transition inning where the teams are starting to see a picture the third time or seeing the first reliever. It’s where the cracks show.

Why are the Rockies pitchers so bad? You might be tempted to think it’s because they pitch on the moon. But, actually – oh, sorry, yeah. It’s because they pitch on the moon.

They Pitch on the Moon

Too often the Rockies conversation misses the point about their ballpark. Are home runs easier to hit there? Yes. Of course. It’s the easiest stadium to hit a home run:

Um, as I was saying, it is the 10th easiest stadium to hit a home run in. That’s right. The spirit of the 90s is no longer alive in Denver. The humidor is doing its job. So why is pitching in Colorado so hard?

The Statcast park factors help paint the picture. Look at all that red in the columns from OBP through 3B:

This isn’t the Three-True-Outcome stadium many fans think it is. Why are OBP and 3B measures so high?! Look at the size of the outfield here compared to a run-neutral park like Comerica Park and Busch Stadium (from Clem’s Baseball):

There’s significantly more grass to cover in Denver than your typical ballpark. And despite that massive grassy space, they still rank among the highest HR rates in baseball. So outfielders have to cover a lot of ground, and the ball flies like a cockatoo with its tail feathers on fire.

The park factor doesn’t end with just the size of the outfield. The effect of thin air is powerful also on the movement characteristics exerted upon the ball:

Generally speaking, good pitch movement is unique pitch movement. But in Colorado, the thin air minimizes movement. Air molecules are the road, and baseball seams are the tire treads. When the air is thin, the seams do not have enough “grip” to make big turns. This means all movement in Colorado is severely restricted. Consider what happened to Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s fastball in his visits to Coors this season:

Yamamoto lost about four inches of vertical break and two inches of horizontal break on his fastballs. That is taking his fastball, his primary pitch and all the muscle memory needed for hitting his specific locations, and turning it into Emerson Hancock’s fastball.

I’ve also talked with hitters who played in thin air, both Colorado and places like Salt Lake City, and they’ve contended that balls pushed and pulled down the lines go straight, they don’t slice and curl like normal batted balls. That’s a hard concept for the casual fan to understand, but anyone who has played the corner outfield roles knows that you have to read the ball’s movement, watch how the wind and spin push it away from you.

My cursory dig into the data doesn’t back up this idea; when looking at batted line drives, Coors (at least this year) has not shown an excess of hits down the line:

Comparing the differences in these two plots, we can definitely see how outfielders at Coors have to play deeper, but we can’t see any extra hits along the lines:

If anything, there are fewer hits along the lines at Coors – but is this a product of teams playing closer to the lines at Coors (their positioning models reacting to the frequency of balls hit down the lines)? It’s hard to say.

A more thorough analysis would also look at bat metrics to determine the “foul likelihood” of a swing and see if Coors differs from the league. It certainly has one of the lowest strikeout rates (and some players have suggested a favorable batter’s eye plays into this), but that may also be a factor resulting from near-miss foul balls in other stadiums being in play at Coors. It’s possible.

But the idea that batted balls, like pitched balls, see reduced effect from spin rates is plausible. And whatever the exact causes, the effects of minimized pitch movement and control, further batted ball distances and a bigger outfield, the net result is the same:

More balls in play. More runs. More fun.

Colorado is a fun place for baseball. It hasn’t been fun for Rockies fans, but the environmental and stadium factors here represent a delightful combination of the very elements the commissioner has been taking a red pen to the rule book for. The New Baseball we’ve been looking for was here in Denver all along.

Yes, pitching on the moon is extremely difficult, especially when every other series you’re pitching back on Earth. That sudden, inconsistent alteration of baseball physics must wreak havoc on pitcher muscle memory. You can’t use the same “targets” on the road as you do at home. The effectiveness of your repertoire can oscillate wildly from appearance to appearance, forcing you to reinvent your gameplan and identity each game—the gameplan and identity that got you to the majors, through years and years of work in amateur and minor league baseball.

Working in the Rockies pitching staff, to put it simply, is a mind fork.

I don’t think that alone can explain their terrible pitching performance this year. That problem goes deeper—and we’ll address this shortly. But this first caveat, the Pitching on the Moon Caveat, is an elephant-big one, heaving itself into any room where Colorado pitching conversations begin.

And it applies both directions.

How They Are Bad: They Can’t Hit

The Rockies cannot score runs:

Oops. I seem to have posted a chart showing their league-worst defensive metrics. Yes, despite playing in the mammoth Coors Field, they have sacrificed their run prevention efforts to maximize their ability to—

—score runs. Yikes.

“Okay, okay, okay. We get it. The team with the worst record is having a bad year. This is how it works. If you’re looking at the worst-record team, you’ll probably find some worst-in-the-league stats.”

But this isn’t a problem confined to 2025:

The Rockies actually made the playoffs in 2017 and 2018, and they still had a bad offense. And in 5 of the last 10 full seasons, they also had bad defense to go along with their bad offense.

How is this happening? Look, every front office is full of smart minds, creative thinkers, and very, very hard workers. No group of GMs and AGMs is a monolith. They debate and disagree and differ from each other.

But from the outside, it sure does look like the Rockies leadership is starting and guiding their conversations about hitters using batting average.

I guess I should note that batting average is not without any value; heck, we can see it’s got a solid correlation with our flagship hitting metric, DRC+. If we plucked the top qualified batting averages from around the majors and put them into one lineup, I bet we’d score some runs:

I’ve added some positions for fun.

But ultimately, batting average—especially at the team level—leaves a lot of meat on the bone, so to speak. There are many ways to increase run scoring, namely taking walks and hitting for power. And in a ballpark where strikeouts are so hard to find and gappers are so common, the value of a walk is so much greater.

There is obviously a bit of bias in the above plot. The Rockies play in the highest batting average stadium, so they naturally run high batting averages. But when we consider they underindex on isolate power (ISO), the metric most helped by their stadium, we have to consider this systematic problem a choice, not a byproduct:

Despite running some of the highest batting averages over the last 10 full seasons, the Rockies have only once had an ISO in the 90th percentile or higher. They play. On the moon. And they haven’t led the league in ISO or SLG or HR or any good offensive metrics over the last decade.

They play on the moon, and they’re losing by five runs once the opposing starting pitcher leaves the game, so they’re also barely scoring runs while facing the softest ends of opposing bullpens. They aren’t grinding through setup men and closers, they’re facing Isaiah Campbell and Mason Fluharty for two-inning stints.

This should be the funnest offense to watch in the sport, but instead they’re barely scraping by.

Context: They Seem Like a Good Business

The toilet-bowl performance the Rockies have displayed this year, this decade, is flabbergasting. It’s frustrating. Why? Because they sell out their stadium. They lock in their superstars to reasonable extensions. They avoid the chronic hot-seat mania that so many other teams employ—both for their players and their front office.

Say what we might about the decision-making of the Baseball Operations departments, the ownership group has spent in free agency and management has filled the stadium like a proper mid-market team, a team in regular contention:

Remember, this is the franchise that has averaged an industry-worst 70 wins per 162 games since 2015. And yet they spend near or above the league average in payroll. Only in 2021, the first post-COVID season, did they have below-average per-game attendance.

The Rockies stadium sits downtown, easily accessible to the freeway. Google Maps projects you can drive from Boulder, CO to the stadium in about 50 minutes. During rush hour.

If you want to visit the husk of Tropicana Field during rush hour, you better not be coming from any further than somewhere within Tampa or St. Petersburg itself, and even then, 50 minutes probably won’t be enough to cover it, unless you have a helicopter and a parachute. Want to walk to the White Sox stadium? You’ll have to pick where you want to stroll across a massive freeway or underneath massive train tracks. Plan to visit a Dodgers game next year? Might as well get in the car now.

And again, we may say what we will about the Baseball Ops decisions underpinning this reality, but the Rockies—relative to the industry—are extremely loyal to their players. The trade of Nolan Arenado and the free agency departure of Trevor Story were painful moments for Rockies fans, no doubt. But they’re noteworthy in part because they represent a departure of norms for the franchise.

Corporate wants you to find the difference between the 2021 Rockies rotation and the 2025 Rockies rotation:

The underperforming pitching staff in 2021 is surprisingly well represented in the underperforming 2025 pitching staff. Remember, this is the worst team in baseball since 2015, and yet, they have split their playing time among surprisingly few players:

The teams on the far left of these charts typically possess high-end talent, workhorse All-Stars that teams are compelled to pour playing time into. Teams on the right are up-and-down or rebuilding franchises, ones that have undergone massive roster overhauls in the last decade or that are constantly plugging and unplugging roster experiments, hoping for a breakthrough.

By these metrics, the Rockies are comparable to the Yankees in terms of roster stability. The Yankees, a franchise that featured Gerrit Cole, Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Masahiro Tanaka, and many other must-play studs during this time period, had about the same roster turnover as the worst team in baseball.

The Rockies simply stuck by their guys. Charlie Blackmon, Germán Márquez, Antonio Senzatela: These guys have been treated like international superstars by the club that couldn’t build a winning roster around them or through them. And this is an approach consistent with what I’ve heard from folks within the organization. They commit to their employees up and down the ladder; they believe development isn’t just in the minors; they believe major leaguers can improve as well as the staff that supports them. That’s a really cool way to look at it, if I’m being honest.

Sadly, they do all this while also brushing aside the insights from analytical research. They possess so many characteristics that I would find encouraging in a corporate environment, but dismiss the data-driven mindset I pursue in pretty much all avenues of my personal life, from my choice of medical options to my purchasing a new computer part. I look for data-driven research because it tends to be the best, most impartial wisdom I can find.

That has not been the Rockies approach, and that failure in judgment is hurting Rockies fans—it’s hurting the sport as a whole.

This is a franchise with a beautiful well-located stadium. A devout fanbase. A history of spending and community goodwill. In so many ways, the Rockies are a great organization. But in the one, big, glaring way, they are so transparently the worst.

But I, for one, am rooting for that to get better.