And Then There's Colorado

When 52-80 is a Mile High dream

Here’s a reminder that during the 2020 baseball season, the Colorado Rockies required several members of the analytics and player development departments to perform the duties of clubhouse staff. These staffers essentially worked two full-time jobs around the clock so that the organization wouldn’t need to return furloughed part-time clubbies to work.

There’s the abstract clubhouse culture that we often hear about in baseball, then there’s Colorado clubhouse culture, where data analysts apply stain stick to dirty uniforms.

Someone with the Rockies might want to order more OxiClean. People have noticed a pretty deep stain.

In Denver, the culture is cultivated at the very top by owner, chairman and CEO Dick Monfort. So no one around baseball was surprised on Sunday when Monfort issued a statement in the wake of Bud Black’s dismissal, deeming his team’s performance “unacceptable.” One paragraph later, he wished his manager of eight-plus years “nothing but the best going forward.” I suppose one advantage of being fired is that Black is now free to go forward.

The Rockies, meanwhile, find themselves drifting aimlessly in a division of contenders and on pace for a third straight 100-loss season. The White Sox at least have the decency to follow some sort of rebuilding plan while they plummet towards the century mark for the third consecutive year.

With last night’s loss, Colorado fell to 7-34, tying the 1988 Orioles through 41 games. That O’s team began the year 0-21.

It was only a matter of time before Bud Black was fired. When the Rockies replaced hitting coach Hensley Meulens with former big-league skipper and erstwhile Rox special assistant Clint Hurdle last month, the scapegoating was well underway. Hurdle’s 22-game tenure as hitting coach ended Sunday evening. He was promoted to bench coach under interim manager Warren Schaeffer. (Black’s bench coach, Mike Redmond, was fired as well.)

Under Meulens, the Rockies went 3-15 with a slash line of .220 / .285 / .344.

Under Hurdle, the Rockies went 4-18 with a slash line of .218 / .287 / .373.

Maybe under the combination of new hitting coaches Jordan Pacheco and Nic Wilson, they’ll go 5-21. Marginal gains, right? Last night, the new-look Rox dropped the series opener in Texas, 2-1.

Colorado’s next six series are against the Rangers, D-backs, Phillies, Yankees, Cubs, and Mets. Then they play in Miami before hosting the Mets and Giants.

If you can find five wins in there, I’d like the name of your optometrist.

On Saturday, the Padres jumped out to a 19-0 lead at Coors Field. After the fifth inning, I think I saw crew chief Marvin Hudson flip through his rule book, hoping to find an old forgotten 10-run rule (or ancient melodies).

The game went the distance, and the Pads held on for a 21-0 victory. It’s impossible to separate that outcome from Bud Black’s final weekend in Denver. However, even if we remove that three-touchdown blowout from the Rockies ledger, they’d still have the worst run differential in MLB (-108) by 36 runs. (The Marlins are at -72.)

This is my way of saying: The manager was not the problem. Sports executives love to say that culture eats strategy. Perhaps that’s why the Rockies have failed to demonstrate any salient strategy in recent history; culture would have devoured it anyway.

Rival executives would be challenged to find more than a few players on the Rockies’ roster that could arguably upgrade the depth of their own rosters.

When MLB expanded the active roster limit to 26 in the aftermath of Covid, the game added 30 additional big leaguers on a daily basis. Put another way, 30 players who would have been in the minor leagues under the 25-man roster were now in the Show. As I watched the Rockies this weekend, I wondered if there had been a cosmic reallocation of many of those 26th men. How else did so many end up in Denver?

Incredibly, the announced attendance at Saturday evening’s game topped 38,000. Fans love Coors Field — and for good reason. That tens of thousands show up to watch a team that will break the 2024 White Sox record of 121 losses is a testament to the game and to the setting. It also sends the wrong message to ownership.

What would it take for this mile-high team to climb to 52-80? Dysfunction, well documented and whispered, has plagued the organization for at least a decade. Such behavior doesn’t even factor in the difficulty of playing baseball in altitude.

ESPN recently published a highly entertaining oral history of pitching at Coors Field and the inherent challenges of playing the game there. One of the best quotes comes from Hall of Fame manager Jim Leyland, who quit after one season in Colorado. He told Buck Showalter: “I love the game, I want to manage baseball. This is not baseball.”

Bud Black has been fired. He and Redmond have joined Meulens. They don’t have to watch the Rockies’ brand of baseball anymore.