So long bozos! And thanks for all the laughs

End of Watch

Much like it began way back at the end of March, the Rockies ended their season with a road defeat. Their 119th, the franchise’s worst record in it’s history. I won’t labor the points that I’ve written before or that many others have written before. That the Rockies were as bad as they were unfortunately became the only interesting thing about them. Hunter Goodman’s breakout as a strong hitting catcher became overshadowed by the team’s inability to come even close to looking like a competent professional outfit. It wouldn’t be interesting or exciting to continue to talk about it. If you want to see those fun facts about their losses and run differential, if you want to read about their 1890’s contemporaries in failure, there’s plenty of places to find that. The 2025 Rockies are dead, at least in one literal sense. They won’t be playing another game this year. The players on the team will continue to live, the memory of this season will long be talked about, but for now this team is dead and we are free to care about other things.

I think about the time one can have with the Rockies, it certainly was an argument that it was wasted this year. How many hours were spent not just watching or experiencing them, but thinking about them? About what decisions they should or shouldn’t make, the players they should draft or call up, the trades that would make the most sense. How much of that could’ve been spent on other hobbies? I hate when people say it could’ve gone to curing cancer or fixing the world’s problems because this is hobby time, but what other hobbies could’ve existed for you then? Or, could you have simply just, as Vonnegut so eloquently said, “farted around” this summer and not spent any brain power at all on their exploits? I don’t know the answer, I don’t pretend to know how anyone else thinks. But the role of sports fandom has a line that, if it’s crossed, makes a person give up. If it wasn’t crossed this year, will it ever?

The 2025 Rockies are dead, their season is buried and will only live in the bar conversations and group chats that carry on. That really is any sports team’s legacy. None of this is really that consequential when you think about it. Sure, they economically drive that area of town and a good Rockies team helps all of those bars and restaurants, but that’s just a few businesses in a world full of them. Sure, you can credit the emotions felt from being a fan of a good baseball team to temporarily curing your depression or driving you into a good group of friends. But, really, in the end it is just baseball. Angles, physics, spin, feats of strength and agility. There are no real battlefields or courtrooms at play here. Sports fandom is obviously an irrational, silly hobby to have. Spending months of your life caring about the outcome of a game because your city has the shared care.

But, and I’ve wrote about it before, it’s also the most rational thing you can do. Because it’s your friends, your grandmother, your heritage, the shared humanity you are part of whether you want to be or not. The 2025 Rockies, though now dead and simply a punchline of the past, are still part of that. So why are we still here? Why are we disappointed in them and hoping they change their ways? You’re reading this email, you’ve probably got an opinion in there. It must be in those things, I suppose, those wonderful things that keeps us around.

At the risk of sounding too sentimental towards a horrible baseball team, I’ll stop talking about that now. This was a bad team, frontwards and backwards. Outside of Goodman and Tovar, I don’t know how many players in that lineup start anywhere else in the league. Just God awful. Not sure where you start. The 2025 Rockies are dead and God bless them for giving us that. If they kept playing it would feel like when a toddler recognizes that you’re annoyed by them but need the attention. Why are you still here? We’d ask. Go where you belong! They mercifully stopped playing though and gave us this time to reconnect with our hobbies and our reading list, we can catch up on Hacks or finally go to the movie theater. Thankfully, no matter how bad it gets, there is always a time where they stop. Now, they get to turn a page, even if it’s a page to the same words from before. So long bozos! And thanks for all the laughs!

The 2026 Rockies are alive, at least in spirit, they’re alive in the opposite way that the 2025 Rockies are dead. Neither of these things exist in front of us, but they exist all the same. Walker Monfort now takes the wheel, a third Monfort with controlling stakes in the organization’s futures, just what we asked and prayed for. Critically, the team has yet to make any moves outside of this. Maybe Walker needed time to update his logins, maybe HR has to clear the badges to the right doors, I don’t know. The lack of urgency is concerning, though having been around for a long time I guess I don’t know why I’m surprised by it. Here stands the 2026 Rockies, never ones to get the head start on anything. That’s the legacy so far at least.

For next spring, and the 2026 Rockies as they bumble to life, the team probably has a belief they couldn’t possibly be worse than the last one. Surely, they’ve found the bottom. But the bottom isn’t necessarily one that gets worse only if you go deeper. Another year or two stuck in the same mud probably gets the same dirt on your reputation, all things considered. The Rockies organization, and the Monforts, are probably considering how much waiting one more year really costs them. After all, in 2027 there will be new TV deals to negotiate, new salary rules to meet, a labor fight growing in uncertainty. There may not be a major reason to declare the 2025 season as the end of an era and setting 2026 as the beginning of a new one. Other than, of course, the reason that it makes you look like a functioning organization and not one built around the meddling of an incompetent mad man. How much does that dollar cost in the long run? How much does it cost now? Is it more or less than the dollar earned in the CBA fight next winter? I don’t know the answer to that. But as the salary cap Dick is leading the charge for looks less likely (and the owners appear less eager than ever to have THIS be the CBA they make that fight), it certainly feels shortsighted to not alter your structure now.

If things stay the same and Bill Schmidt comes back for one last try at “signing enough veteran infielders to make the team good again”, is that the line? Do we stop watching then? Or, is there really not a line? It’s not their sport, anyhow. They might continue to misunderstand how to make a good team, they might embarrass and offend all those that purchase a jersey, but that’s not their game to take, not their memories to tarnish, not their relationships to break. Maybe the 2026 Rockies are dead in spirit already, never really being given a chance to actually live. But if the time is wasted, there are worse places to waste it.

Better ones too, though.

The 2025 Rockies are dead, long live the 2025 Rockies.

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