Rebuilding the Rockies, Part 1

Sunday evening, after the team had successfully closed out just their seventh win in 40 games, the Colorado Rockies fired their longtime manager Bud Black and bench coach Mike Redmond. The moves came just 24 hours after losing 21-0, a cherry on top of a week of being outscored by 39 runs over six games. The Rockies are on pace for the worst record in baseball history and you simply can’t keep your manager when you’re doing something like that. You can argue the merits of firing a manager vs. the team builders but ultimately I think the best you can come up with there is that they should all be fired.

Black’s firing puts up some interesting questions about the state of the organization and if there is actual thought that something different might be happening. All things considered within the context of the Rockies, probably not. Owner Dick Monfort’s most notorious characteristic is his loyalty to people within the organization. After the organization hired Dan O’Dowd in 2001, the Rockies have been managed by internal hires every year since. Bill Geivett, Jeff Bridich, and now Bill Schmidt were all called up from jobs within the organization already. For all intents and purposes, it has felt like Dick’s son Sterling Monfort was next in line for the GM job, having risen through the ranks as fast as nepotism can allow and currently managing the Talent Development department. But maybe, the bottom falling out has put something different in the eye of the decision maker from Greeley. In this line of thought, the team would need to rebuild it’s very infrastructure from the bottom. In any case, this is an exciting opportunity to wonder what it would take to make the Rockies Good. So now we have a challenge, an exercise in problem solving. How do the Rockies build a winning culture and organization? Well, let’s see what we can do.

This is Rebuilding The Rockies. Part 1.

The Current State

With any rebuild, it is important to first get a sense of where you are, even if you are in a dumpster like the Rockies. The Major League team has current commitments that you can’t just DOGE your way out of.

Using FanGraphs’ lovely tool RosterResource we can build an idea (though not exact rendering) of what the Rockies owe their current roster beyond this season.

The Rockies payroll currently stands at a reported $126M. Out of 26 players, 11 are signed to guaranteed MLB contract in 2025, five of those with commitments into 2026, with the remaining 15 players either in arbitration (four) or currently on their pre-arbitration rookie level minimums. Those 15 are guaranteed this season but the flexibility remains for the club beyond this year to either retain control or release the player without financial penalty. This isn’t the worst situation a payroll can be in, only five players are guaranteed a salary in 2026. But when you look at who those five players are, it gets tough quickly.

Tovar is likely to correct and go positive by year end (though no guarantees), so let’s say that 39M of the Rockies guaranteed money for 2026 is going to two negative win players. For reference to anyone without a WAR guide locked into their brain, anything below two POSITIVE WAR by seasons end is considered below average. So Bryant and Senzatela’s presence is not just slightly below average, it is actively bad.

If you were to run a similar ~126M dollar payroll into 2026, you’d have to consider that 1/3 of that is taken up by essentially dead money. In addition, Freeland is likely to be, at best, a league average player so another 16M goes there. This could cap you in the present, but you may not need to worry about the present right now and any savings you find elsewhere should be dedicated to things likely not showing on the field in 2026 anyway.

That’s the MLB team’s standing. Now, how about the rest of the organization? According to Baseball Prospectus (great site, you should subscribe), the Rockies farm system ranks in the top 10 of MLB systems, but underneath that ranking there are worrisome trends. Notably, the Rockies successes in prospect development are all happening on one side of the box score, pitching. The Rockies are becoming increasingly inconsistent in developing hitters and last year’s top draft pick Charlie Condon has already struggled with making the jump to the professional level. This is part of an organizational philosophy that must be rooted out and removed, which we’ll dig into in the next section. All that being said, there are worse places to be than the Rockies farm system after seven straight losing seasons and high draft picks. There are better places to be though, too. Which leads us to our next current state, where they stand on actual organizational investment.

Unfortunately for us, the Rockies books are closed to our eyes. We don’t know how much they invest in analytics, development, scouting resources, etc. We have rumors that they have the smallest department in the big leagues though, we have press releases that they have planned to expand that department with office purchases near Coors, we have posts about how they used the analytics department to do laundry back in 2020. We can ascertain from all of these things that the Rockies do not have a solid investment into the departments outside of the on-field roster. In fact, The Athletic’s latest article on the Rockies internal structure offers more evidence that this is a team unwilling to grow the parts of their tree that would actually improve their entire structure and institute a winning culture.

All in all, as a current apparatus, the Rockies are lacking in just about every key area needed to win professional baseball games. They are being lapped by competition, they view their problems as temporary on field issues due to injury or bad luck. There are very few things the Rockies are even league average in, let alone industry standard. This is a rebuild at every level, a structural undertaking. It will not be just a couple of trades away.

Let’s begin.

The Philosophy

First things first, an organization of any kind needs a culture. Whether that is a ridiculous Corporation putting in a culture about Energy, Hustle, Winning or a Socialist Club having a culture of everyone having a lot of serious interest in history. You need something that gets people excited to do well for each other. The Rockies have a losing culture. One predicated on loyalty over competence. You get hired by the Rockies and then you work there for 30 years regardless of results. The only way out is if you crash your Cybertruck into the I-25 on-ramp or you retire. Obviously, that needs to change. I don’t work in HR, though. I can’t tell you what creates an actual good culture outside of hiring talented people. But when it comes to actual player analysis, development, and deployment, the Rockies need a philosophy there as well. I can take a stab at that.

Pitching

We’ll start with pitching, only because I think it’s easier. Pitching? Easier? Yeah. Here’s the thing, the Rockies media has failed you and failed itself. There are countless jokes about the Rockies pitching. But when it’s all said and done, when you park adjust the numbers and analyze it year by year, the Rockies have had more good pitching staffs than offensive lineups. They’ve had an ERA+ above 100 TWELVE times in their history. One third of their years they’ve fought to a better than average pitching staff. They’ve done it multiple ways, too. Sinker ballers like Aaron Cook, high velocity, low control guys like Ubaldo, limited contact guys like Jorge De La Rosa and Tyler Anderson. All of this leads to a pretty stable and simple conclusion, the Rockies do not need to do anything special to make a good pitching staff. They just need to have good pitchers and invest in the ways that continues to make pitchers good. Here’s Baseball Prospectus contributor Mario Delgado Genzor on the subject in a recent Bluesky thread:

Now, the question comes, how do the Rockies maintain their pitching? In nearly every single one of their seasons that were above average in pitching, the following years they suffered a huge collapse in production. Further, it seems they’ve moved AWAY from understanding what makes pitching work in Colorado. Since 2013, the Rockies have been below average 10 times in 12 seasons. This may change with the heavy influx of pitching currently cooking in the farm, but for all of the consternation on what KIND of pitcher succeeds in Coors, the trick for the Rockies has really just been having good pitchers be available. It’s the keeping them available part that is going to be difficult.

There is a shitty way to do this, which is the way many MLB teams already operate. The idea is that you use up these arms and just have a constant revolving door so that when one arm is depleted, it can be replaced by another. This is a numbers-only way of looking at the sport. The Rockies don’t have to operate this way! But if they don’t, they need to do more than any other ballclub when it comes to investing in keeping their pitchers healthy and pitching effectively. The gap in analytics the Rockies currently have is keeping them from finding good players, sure, but I believe it’s also keeping them from figuring out how to solve the problems in front of them. The biggest problem on the pitching side? Guys staying healthy and effective for more than a handful of seasons. Even the guys above, Ubaldo, Tyler Anderson, they weren’t effective forever. The Rockies can either adapt the Rays style of thought, creating a Union Army of pitchers ready to fill the lines as the ones in front fall, or they can do what I would do. Invest in medical data that tells you how to protect pitchers from succumbing to altitude. Become the lab. It’s not like there isn’t ample evidence that elite athletes already love training at altitude IN Colorado. You have an advantage in that sports teams have lots of money and people generally want to work for them. Use these to expand your power outside of the scouting and analysis of on-field play and into the medical data that could help you create a rotation that can’t be defeated by air.

A new mindset about pitching in Colorado should be to drop all pretense of what type of pitcher they need. That’s simple, you just get a good one. But instead of that focus, the club should invest in what it takes to keep a pitcher alive in Denver. What should they eat? How should they work out? What does altitude do to recovery that differs when they are on the road? How do you adapt free agents with their own individual training plan to your plan? The problems the Rockies need to solve on pitching are not player based, they’re science based. Hire scientists to solve them.

Hitting

Now we get to the real meat of the pie. The Rockies suck ass at developing a hitter. Again, the media has failed us in explaining this but it is never more apparent than now with the Rockies at 7-34 and with a limited amount of true hitting prospects. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a good hitter both with respect to where the Rockies play their home games and just in general. The club is fraught with expired practices and mindsets but they also just do not comprehend the ballpark they play in. It has led to this team’s downfall on more than one occasion. If there is a place that the Rockies have not only strayed from actual successful team building but actively built barriers to prevent improvement, it is in their hitting philosophy. This is not just in the Major Leagues, where the team ranks last in OPS, but it is in the draft and development portion of the club’s structure as well.

Coors Field is a haven for run scoring. The high altitude and wide gaps of the outfield make for consistent entertainment but despite that, the Rockies never seem to hit well on the road. Many arguments have been made for that, including that the changes to pitch movement after a homestand are difficult to understand so the club can’t adjust. But I would argue another possibility, the Rockies have never actually had a good lineup. They’ve had some good hitters, great ones and hall of fame ones even. These hitters ALSO had home/road splits to their name that would make you think they were better at home. That is all true! But! The Rockies play the most games at home than any other park so, they should hit better there. And! These guys were still pretty good on the road! The guys they have now aren’t!

A Rockies hitting philosophy should focus simply on one thing: zero strikeouts. The Three True Outcomes model works for most of baseball, and the Rockies can use it to an extent, but the true advantage of Coors Field is that getting on base is the most dangerous thing you can do and if you make contact here you are more likely to get on base than anywhere else. You should do your best to employ nine hitters that strikeout at a lower rate than anyone else in the league. High BABIP, high contact, speedy guys, and low BABIP, high power, high walk guys. Those are the two types of batters that should exist in the Rockies organization. The Rockies play in the most unique run scoring environment in the sport and it is a pretty good argument to make that they are ASHAMED of that fact and look to build a team that CAN’T HIT to avoid it. Stop that! Lean into making teams regret coming to Denver. Ruin every pitcher that wants a Cy Young. It’s time to line six Luis Arraez type hitters in the majority of your lineup and three Kyle Schwarber’s to bring them home or walk them forward a base. You are not here to play nice and make friends, you are here to have 20 hits fall into the grass just outside the infield and have one guy hit a gigantic home run to cap it all off.

The Rockies currently lead MLB in strikeouts, last year they were second in strikeouts, the year before they were third. If you go back to a time they were good like say, 2018, they were still below league average in strikeouts. The league is striking out more than ever, but the Rockies still pace them. Why? Is this approach causing them to struggle on the road? Is it that Coors is difficult for hitters to adjust to or have the Rockies been running mediocre lineups for over a decade and the road is just where this shows up?

Even in the minor leagues, prospects are washing out because they can’t stop striking out. Sterlin Thompson was highly rated coming into AA Hartford last year until his strikeouts jumped to 122, his K/BB rate went from 1.9 to 2.8, and his OBP collapsed to .319. You’re seeing players take the wrong approach in their development and the Rockies are losing solid, projectable hitters because of what they are teaching. This fix is complex, yet simple. Stop striking out. Draft hitters with a strong zone presence and use your development tools to close gaps by promoting hit or power tools. You do not need to reinvent the wheel, plenty of baseball players fit this profile already, and plenty more will exist in every draft to come.

The philosophy of the Rockies is broken. Broken by incompetence, broken by backwards thinking, broken by a lack of investment. However you slice it, things are not going to get better until they look at these things and change them. Move away from worrying about what kind of pitcher to get, move into what kind of hitter to get. It’s a complete reversal of what the media has harped the Rockies on for three decades but it’s the reality of the situation. And if the Rockies don’t want to embrace reality, then they won’t ever be good.

In part two, we can start to break down the players the Rockies have and who should stay or go. Let’s rebuild the Rockies, together. Even if they won’t do it themselves.