The historically bad 2025 Colorado Rockies look very different than they did when the season began in a three-game series against the Tampa Bay Rays.
With this in mind, the staff at Purple Row felt it would be useful to revisit the “State of the Position” series that we run in March as a season preview.
We’ve also asked authors of the spring pieces to re-evaluate their earlier remarks with an eye toward the trade deadline.
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What I said in March
One of the greatest things about doing an update on a review of ownership
is that there are not going to be a lot of actual change (see our update on Managers and Coaches). In the sports world, such changes have a long lead time, to say the least.
So while change does not happen on the personnel front, that does not mean that half a season cannot tell us anything about what’s going on in the owner’s box. And the Rockies are still on pace to be the worst in modern baseball history, even after securing their first back-to-back home wins of the season AND their first home series win since 2024 over the weekend.
Were I the type to pat myself on the back more, I might try and play as though I saw this coming the whole time. Through the lens about salary cap debates and the Dodgers looking at Bobby Bonilla Day and thinking “What if you made the whole plane out of Bobby Bonillas??”, I posited that salary caps and floors may be good for baseball, they won’t make a meaningful difference for the Rockies. The team doesn’t struggle due to lack of funds; they struggle due to lack of ability to identify how to spend funds well.
That this season has gone the way it has hammers home this point in a way that back-to-back hundred loss seasons (apparently) couldn’t. Why part with your manager who took you to back-to-back playoff appearances six years ago just because he also led you to the two worst seasons in franchise history in back-to-back seasons? The insular nature of the loyal-to-a-fault front office and owner’s box turned an exciting team into a league laughingstock.
And then they started the new season 7-33. At some point the only ones still laughing are the ones just trying not to cry.
Where the Rockies are now
Running out the the worst team in living memory (and giving those outside living memory a run for their money as well) has apparently been enough to shake even the change-averse Monforts from their inactivity. Bud Black was finally given a pink slip; rumors swirl about general manager Bill Schmidt’s status after this season; team president Greg Feasel is leaving at the end of the year (albeit to make way for Walker Monfort, who will be focusing on the business side of the franchise).
Rockies fans desperate for change grasp onto these changes like a dying man in the desert grasps for any semblance of water. Do these changes signal a shift in outlook or approach? Has the losing finally forced the decision makers to consider maybe, just maybe, they could do things differently? Is it possible, to paraphrase our own Skyler Timmins, they will finally stop blaming the smart kids for getting good grades and start to do the work to improve their own grades?
In the middle of the worst of all possible seasons, the best fans can do is read tea leaves. The current owners are not only not going anywhere, their replacements seem evermore likely to come from within their own family, which leaves Rockies fans increasingly at a loss about what to do.
Closing Thoughts
The last three years our own Evan Lang has run an unfortunately necessary recurring series comparing the Rockies to their more successful neighbors occupying Ball Arena. Perhaps his series will come to a stop this year, as the Nuggets and Avalanche will start their regular seasons this fall without a championship or MVP award to celebrate. But the comparison remains provocative.
The Avalanche, staring down a thoroughly mediocre season, remade their roster from goalies to forwards over the course of the year. They even took the risk of trading away franchise icon to pry a little more roster and talent flexibility. That their efforts resulted in a brutal playoff draw and an even more brutal playoff ending does not take away from their willingness to pull every lever to find a championship.
When the Nuggets saw their talented roster stagnating as they prepared to enter the playoffs, they took the unprecedented step of firing their all-time winningest coach and the GM, both of whom delivered a championship less than 24 months prior. That kick in the pants may have helped propel them further in the playoffs than most believed they could go, but that change also resulted in an offseason nobody saw coming, as they too traded away a franchise icon to open up flexibility to improve the roster — again, all in the pursuit of a championship.
I, like Evan before me, don’t want to push this comparison too far, seeing as competitive windows are a thing, and roster building is very different between the three sports. But I’m still left wondering, based on the example of the Avs and Nuggets, how many losses will it take before Monfort & Co. are willing to implement the changes necessary (whatever those might be!) to turn this thing around?
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- Thursday Rockpile: The Rockies and the quest for the “big hit”
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- Colorado Rockies minor league game thread: May 29th, 2025
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- Weekly Pebble Report: Charlie Condon is focused on the present and looking towards the future (May 20th-May 26th)
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