Major League Baseball’s offseason plays out so violently different than other North American sports leagues that the whiplash it causes leads to many think pieces, takes, opinions, and consternation. While the NBA, NHL, and NFL have the same amount of lulls baked into their schedule, they front load their action so as to force the discourse into a never ending “how will this team look now?” versus the MLB’s constant waiting game of when a good player will sign for a team. I don’t know which way is better. I know most fans seem to believe it’s not MLB’s way of doing things, but I’m not sure I can pinpoint why that is.

Beside this argument, we have the days, as Lenin once said, where decades happen. The Rockies stepped into January 28th and made four major league level roster moves that shaped a lot of the major league roster and made a couple of clear statements on where the new front office believes the team’s talent resides (nowhere). This, along with earlier winter moves like signing Willi “Definitely Not Thairo Estrada” Castro, probably locks into place a much different looking lineup than I presumed would exist when the season mercifully ended in October. It’s a roster that isn’t necessarily good but I think one could find many ways to argue it’s better. Like when you pop a deviled egg in that has been sitting out at a 4th of July party all day and you’re like “oh that was a really bad deviled egg". Any deviled egg after that will be orders of magnitude better than that one, regardless of the eggs makeup. So long as it’s not an equally stale, hot egg. Which the Rockies are likely not to be as equally stale and hot of a deviled egg as they were last season. So there’s that. Let’s talk about the moves.

We’ll start with the major league acquisitions and then talk about the major league subtractions, because that’s more fun. The notable Quebecois infielder Julien is a couple of seasons removed from one the more exciting rookie years a Twin has had, peppering the bases with a .380 OBP and hitting 16 home runs. As far as second basemen go, this is like All-Star level stuff if you can get it consistently. The problem is, Julien has since not shown it consistently, like at all. Part of that is that his 2023 may have always been a mirage, having put up a .371 BABIP during that year despite just middling batted ball metrics.

Despite this, Julien shows some strengths that Coors Field may be friendly to. Perhaps most importantly, he rarely chases pitches and has a firm eye for walks. Tell ‘em, Pete.

He gets on base.

The Rockies notably left 2025 without any real good answers at first base. Warming Bernabel survived being shot in a robbery gone awry to land at the cold corner for a few weeks, Blaine Crim was revealed to the public as “not just a guy we made up”, and Michael Toglia wilted in the Albuquerque heat. The Rockies got rid of two of those guys and found themselves in a difficult spot along their infield. In steps Julien.

Edouard can play deuxieme (though not well) but he has also spent a good chunk of time at first. He’s also a lefty. Something that, if you review the Rockies options on RosterResource, they are notably short at within their infield. So you can see the flexibility Julien adds in addition to his ability to go stand on first at least a couple of times a game. He also, kind of weirdly, gives the Rockies two guys that played second for the Twins just last year (he and Willi Castro). So how about that.

The Rockies had a .293 OBP as a team in 2025, which was last in baseball. That sounds bad at first but don’t let that initial bad feeling distract you from the fact they played half their games at a ballpark that allows lots of base runners. You know in the movie Air Bud and the dog is just nailing the fundamentals of basketball but at the same time you’re like “its a dog you can easily play defense on a dog”. That is what reading 2025 Rockies team stats is like. You play in Coors Field how are you the worst team in ALL OF BASEBALL at getting on base?

So you see, even if Julien is not French Chase Utley you have to imagine he improves Rockies hitting from there.

Pierson Ohl sounds like one of the side characters in a Pynchon novel, but he’s actually a change up artist that apparently has dabbled in the wizardry of the knuckleball recently. Though, that may not be the best pitch for the Rockies to ask him to continue to pursue considering what Coors Field does to pitches that hang around. Not a lot else to say, Ohl probably starts in Triple-A and then we can make rash judgements from there.

So here’s the first move of the day the Rockies announced, which when you link everything together, you see Chivilli getting moved as a clearance on the 40-man for Julien. But also, Angel may have just been a project the Rockies no longer wanted to work on and it’s tough to blame them.

A lot of Yankee people are pretty excited about this, mostly because Chivilli fits the profile of Yankee pitching coach Matt Blake’s best case scenario reclamation projects. He has a really good change up that fools a LOT of hitters (42% whiff rate), but his fastball, which he throws close to 50% of the time, got sent to the moon.

According to StatCast, Chivilli threw his fastball 469 times in 2025 and hitters slugged .585 off of it. Almost 59% of the time, if a guy was hitting Angel’s fastball, he was probably hitting the absolute piss out of it. Chivilli gave up 45 hits off his fastball in 58 innings last year, here’s the location heat map on where those pitches landed before getting walloped:

That’s what we in the biz call “down the dick”.

Chivilli’s profile does lend itself to improvement and there’s something to be said that a bad fastball that got it’s ass kicked in the middle of the zone is weirdly common on the 2025 Rockies staff. In terms of reclamation projects, I wouldn’t fault any team taking a chance. But I also won’t blame the Rockies new regime for laying out a list of guys they needed to fix and deciding they couldn’t fix all of them. Which is a good segue to our next transaction…

The story of Yanquiel Fernandez is a tough one for Rockies sickos to stomach. A few years ago, the young Fernandez was an exit velo darling, hitting the laces off the ball in the lower minors and looking like a really solid outfielder for the next era of the team. But as Fernandez rose through the minors so did his red flags. In 2023, the Cuban climbed up to Double-A Hartford as a 20-year-old and saw his first glimpse of high minors pitching. It didn’t bode well. Fernandez’s grip it and rip it style was overmatched as he struck out around 32% of the time.

He returned in 2024 with a new approach that tried it’s best to evaluate pitches versus swinging at mostly everything and hoping power carried through. But, that power that defined Yanquiel was zapped by this new “try to determine if it has any spin” approach. Enter 2025. Fernandez put up a middling slug in Albuquerque before striking out 33% of the time in his short cup of coffee. Overall, the least mean thing you could say about him was that his prospect shine had worn off. The Rockies saw it worse than that and ultimately decided to cut their losses.

This is neither an indefensible move or a surefire good call. Fernandez is still just 22 and could still unlock a good hitter within himself. The power he showed for years is exciting and teams may still chase it. The new Rockies brain trust is making a gamble here that Yanquiel’s bell has fully rung when it may not have and that carries a risk. This isn’t cutting Michael Toglia who was given hundreds of PAs in the majors to show his stuff. But, as noted above, Fernandez wasn’t the guy in their top 10 prospects anymore. It might not be pretty here but there might be some truth to the evaluation of these guys the Schmidt Rockies coveted being “butt ass”. Like Chivilli, they have a lot of guys to fix, they can’t fix them all.

Further, the Rockies corner outfield isn’t exactly the land of opportunity right now. Where does Yanquiel fit in with Jordan Beck, Zac Veen, Sterlin Thompson, Jared Thomas, and Cole Carrigg? There are only so many games to play in the outfield and they don’t let you put more than three guys out there. I’ve asked.

For now, after these moves, I’ve got this as my projected Opening Day 2026 lineup:

Could flip Karros for Amador and move Castro to third. Overall, I think the PDP Rockies are making a couple of big statements here and that is 1) They are not going to rush any upper minors hitters into bad spots. Veen, Amador, Karros, Condon are all going to get their time to bake and time to dust off the loser org particles and 2) The 43 win Rockies were bad and we shouldn’t be very concerned with any of them leaving the team.

The first point is solidified by the Julien and Rumfield acquisitions. Even if Julien fits more into second base or a right side of the infield utility role, the club now has Rumfield, Blaine Crim, and Troy Johnstone all ready to absorb at-bats at the cold corner. Whether or not those three are just variants of the same “hit it in the air” mentality like a weird clone of CJ Cron is beside the point. The Rockies are not clearing the runway for Charlie Condon, they have evaluated the upper minors and found them wanting. This has led them to temporarily block these guys from getting rushed to the bigs or, for those especially wanting, led to formerly good prospects having to apply for new jobs.

You don’t lose 119 games by accident and cutting your losses on members of the team that got you there is probably fine in the long run. The team was bad, we don’t need to pretend they were this close to being good. You might find this a little sympathetic to a new regime stepping into place, giving them the benefit of the doubt. You’d probably be right. But I think that aligns to what DePodesta and Byrnes have said since they got here. The organization was anything but organized and that led to the significant collapse in player development. If that is to be taken as true (and how could you not believe that to be true when you watched the Rockies), then the argument that all moves made now are in accordance with “actually analyzing players” has a decent backing. If that analysis is wrong then that’s something we’ll all find out, but I’d admit I have a sympathetic lens on this due to the fact PDP is literally entering The Wasteland.

go rocmoes