Colorado Rockies Might Be The Most Hopeless Franchise In American Sports

I’m not a clickbait headline guy, I swear. The Colorado Rockies are bad, but they’re not currently the worst team in baseball. Heck, they just swept the Milwaukee Brewers. They’ve been bad since 2019, and not long before that were bad from 2011-16 before two brief forays into the postseason that resulted in exactly zero games won. In all of that time, I’d venture to guess that they were never at any point in time the very worst team in baseball,

However, I do not take this claim lightly – the Rockies may in fact be the single most hopeless team in the four major United States mens’ sports. (I am not including soccer in this judgment, as I have basically zero knowledge of the health of those franchises.)

How can I make such a claim? First, let’s go to a macro level and compare baseball to football, basketball and hockey. There are some bad hockey teams, and my Philadelphia Flyers are one of them. They recently dismissed Chuck Fletcher as GM, and I now have hope. Plus, they and all of the other NHL bottom-feeders are in the Connor Bedard sweepstakes – he’s considered to be a can’t-miss generational prospect. The Arizona Coyotes used to play their home games in a mall, so I guess they’re at least in the discussion. Similarly, in basketball, the sport where a single player can make the most difference, all of the also-rans are currently in the Victor Wembanyana derby – he’s considered to be a Michael Jordan/LeBron James-level prospect.

Then there’s football. The Chicago Bears earned the 1st pick in the recent NFL draft and dealt it to the Carolina Panthers for a king’s ransom of draft picks. They have a high-upside quarterback in place in Justin Fields, and had more salary cap space than any club in the NFL entering the recent free agency period. You can worst-to-first somewhat easily in football, and the Bears have at least a shot to do so in the thin NFC.

So I’m pretty comfortable saying that the most hopeless franchise would currently reside in major league baseball. Is it the White Sox? Nope. I wrote about their misery early this week, and of course they’re now on a win streak. Is it the Kansas City Royals? They’re close, but they’ve got a young potential superstar in Bobby Witt Jr. plus his burly sidekick, 1B Vinny Pasquantino. They appear to be unable to develop starting pitching despite a pitcher-friendly home park, but I digress. Or the Oakland Athletics? I wrote about them recently as well, and while they’re worse than the Rockies right now, they have a track record of developing quality young players and at least have the potential of much greener financial pastures ahead of them in Las Vegas.

Why the Rockies, then? There are a bunch of reasons.

• Lack Of Impact Major League Talent – This is an easy and obvious one. There are no stars here. Their highest-paid player is RF Kris Bryant, upon whom they bestowed a 7-year, $182 million contract prior to the 2022 season. His production and reliability had been trending downward leading up to his walk year, but the Rockies just had to have him and grossly outbid their competition. He missed most of 2022 with foot issues, so the contract didn’t start well. It won’t end well, either. 1B C.J. Cron, 2B Ryan McMahon and DH Charlie Blackmon are decent players, but only McMahon has remaining upside. As for the pitchers, we’ll get to them in a bit.
• Lack Of Impact Minor League Talent – For the first time in a spell, the club’s minor league position player depth isn’t half bad. They’re pretty thin at the top, however. SS Ezequiel Tovar, 21, is their consensus top prospect, and he’s looked pretty overmatched at the major league level so far. I still think he’s got a shot to stick, but if he’s the best you got……OF Zac Veen and SS Adael Amador are next in line, but neither appears to be a franchise-changer. Pitching depth is paper-thin.
• Ownership/Front Office Quality Or Lack Thereof – The Monfort family has owned the club since 2005, and from all accounts they are very loyal to their employees. Perhaps too much so, in fact. While the rest of the baseball industry is knee-deep in analytics, the Rockies remain stuck in a previous era. They did have a fairly large analytics department at one time, but many members left after it became clear their work wasn’t being utilized. Previous GM Jeff Bridich was open to analytics, at least publicly, but was replaced by Bill Schmidt in 2021. Schmidt was previously their Scouting Director, and let’s just say that he is not an analytics guy. There are good scouting-first front offices and good analytics-first front offices, and many do both quite well. The Rockies are arguably the only front office still living in the 1980s.
• The Elephant In The Room – The Rockies play their home games at high altitude, making their calculus for winning baseball different than any other club’s. Some might look at this as a major hindrance, but I look at extreme contexts as opportunities. It’s pretty simple – you’ve got to over-invest in pitching, while you can get away with under-investing in hitting. Your pitchers simply must miss tons of bats and induce grounders, but you can have a good offense in Colorado with a bunch of guys who make decent contact and have fly ball tendencies. You know, like Nolan Arenado, the superstar they paid the Cardinals to take off of their hands. Again, I digress. The Rockies actually did the hard part – the pitching – fairly well. Jon Gray, German Marquez and Kyle Freeland represented a perfectly respectable homegrown starting pitching nucleus to build around. Gray showed up in 2015, Marquez in 2016 and Freeland in 2017, and all have been above league average starters after adjustment for home park. But they got no help, and only Freeland remains as Gray left for Texas in free agency and Marquez just underwent Tommy John surgery. In the meantime, the Rockies have failed to accomplish the simple part – put together an offense at altitude. They let Arenado and DJ LeMahieu leave, invested a ton of money and years into grounder machine Ian Desmond and now into a declining Bryant. The roster the Rockies are running out there is slated to earn over $172 million this season. That’s an abomination.

What must happen to put the Rockies on the right track? Honestly, at this point I think the team needs to be sold, or at the very least the front office needs to be swept totally clean. Denver is a great market with an excellent fan base, Coors Field is a great stadium – finances are clearly not a problem. But when you’re playing in the same division as the heavyweight Dodgers and Padres, you need to be competitive in every aspect of the sport, from finances to analytics to scouting to player development.

The Detroit Tigers have been downtrodden for a long time – they changed GMs just last offseason and I already see many signs of hope there. We’ve already discussed some of the other clubs that are currently way off track. Just a decade ago, the Astros were worse than the Rockies are now. But they had a plan. The Rockies don’t, and they aren’t going anywhere until they develop one.