The Rockies are on pace for the worst season in a 125 years
The 2025 Colorado Rockies aren’t just a bad team, they’re a historically bad team. Their position players have a collective -4.2 fWAR, and their pitchers a collective 1.6 fWAR. They have a baffling high amount of players who either just haven’t hit, can’t defend, or both. In a fourth of the games, Ketel Marte has more fWAR than their top two position players, Hunter Goodman and Jordan Beck combined. Even worse, their five best position players with positive value have less combined fWAR than Corbin Carroll, and Geraldo Perdomo and Gabriel Moreno aren’t far off either. The Dbacks have seven position players with higher war than their three best players
After beating the Marlins two games in a row, the Rockies raised their record to 11 wins and 50 losses. If the Rockies continue with their current .180 winning percengage the rest of the season, it puts them on pace for a 29 win and 133 loss season. This would be considerably worse than last year’s Chicago White Sox (41-121) or the 1962 New York Mets (40-120), the worst teams in the expansion era. That .180 winnings percentage would be worse than any Major League team in the last 126 years, and only the infamous 1899 Cleveland Spiders (20-134, .130 winning percentage) and the 1890 Pittsburgh Alleghenys (23-113 .169 win%) having a worse winning percentage in the last 145 years.
Last years Rockies weren’t good either, losing 101 games and finished dead last in the NL West. In response, the ownership did absolutely nothing to improve the team over the offseason. They’ve been bad for the majority of their existence, too.. The Rockies were even worse in 2023 though, too, finishing with a 59-103 record and dead last in the NL West. Their most expensive player, Kris Bryant has been injured and bad throughout the contract that he signed in ’22. If they finish in dead last again this season, they won’t be rewarded with a number one pick like they would have under the old rules. Thanks to the current lottery system, at best they will have the #10 pick. Not that it will matter all that much, as the Rockies have had five top ten picks in the last five years, with very little to show for it so far.
The Rockies are well known for lacking a modern, dedicated analytics department and apparently only have 12 people in their R&D department. To make that glaring weakness even worse, their traditional domestic and international amateur player scouting is and always has been lacking compared to the better, well run teams. Throughout the organization’s existence, with few exceptions, the Rockies have failed to identify and develop amateur talent. You can count on one hand how many successful starting pitchers the Rockies have developed in their entire existence. You could count on the other hand the amount of legitimate all-star position players they’ve had throughout their existence. If you took the best players from throughout the organization’s entire existence, I doubt you could assemble a 26 man roster that is actually good.
It’s not a coincidence that the one constant throughout the Rockies existence has been the Monfort family owning the team. It has actually come to the point where the Rockies are so bad that they’re quite literally an embarrassment to the rest of the league and arguably professional sports as a whole. It would be in the best interest of Major League Baseball to force a sale and finding a new owner who is willing to modernize and invest in the team. I don’t see how else you can ‘fix’ the Rockies, especially in a division that contains four other teams that are actually taking the game seriously. The Rockies need a top to bottom organizational shakeup and restructuring, and that’s never happening under the Monforts.
It’s a good thing now that Major League Baseball is no longer rewarding bad teams that stay bad. The White Sox aren’t quite as bad as they were last year, but they are another team that won’t be rewarded for another poor season. That’s the point, to disincentivize tanking. Unfortunately, MLB has no way to disincentivize owners from incompetence, intentional or otherwise. The Rockies may luck into a Wild Card and go on a World Series losing playoff run once ever 31 years, but they’ve proven they’re incapable of winning the division; a new owner and divisional realignment may be the Rockies only chance of ever changing that.