Last Wednesday evening it was reported that the Colorado Rockies had made their first free agent Major League deal of the off-season. While the move is not yet official, the Rockies are said to be bringing
in veteran right-handed pitcher Michael Lorenzen on a one-year, $8 million deal.
Bringing in Lorenzen—who is expected to be a key member of the rotation in 2026—marks a drastic change in operating procedure for the Rockies. The team hasn’t brought in a free agent starting pitcher on a big league contract from outside the organization since they signed Chad Kuhl for $3 million in 2022. He is also the first free agent starting pitcher the Rockies have signed for more than $5 million in over a decade, when they brought in Kyle Kendrick in 2015.
The Rockies have long avoided bringing in expensive and established big league pitchers for the rotation. They have instead opted to stock the pond with home-grown talent and prospects—your Kyle Freelands, Germán Márquezes, and Chase Dollanders—while relying on low risk and low cost bargain bin options as supplements.
This approach has, of course, not been a particularly good one for the Rockies. They have consistently fielded one of the worst rotations in baseball over their seven consecutive losing seasons, and set a modern era record for worst ERA at 6.65 during their historically bad 2025 campaign. The team has largely failed to develop prospects like Dollander, gotten diminishing returns and poor results from their home grown pitchers like Freeland and Márquez—the latter of which is now a free agent—and the less said about the tenures of bargain acquisitions like Dakota Hudson and José Ureña, the better.
The pending signing of Lorenzen represents the new Rockies front office under Walker Monfort and president of baseball operations Paul Depodesta continuing to live up to their word when it comes to the rebuild thus far. In this circumstance, DePodesta said he would explore every avenue—including free agency—when it came to adding pitching to the Rockies roster. He explained the approach to Patrick Saunders of the Denver Post earlier this off-season.
“I think the short answer is that there isn’t one answer, right? I think our eyes need to be open for every possible avenue. I say that to mean it could be free agents, it could be different types of free agents. [It] certainly could be trades. And it also needs to be some of the development of our own players. We have a lot of pitchers on our 40-man roster. I know some guys got experience last year. We added another starter this year to the 40-man roster just last week, but there are other young players coming through. So I think it needs to be maybe a little of all the above, but clearly it’s an area of focus for us as we start the off season. But I don’t think there’s just going to be one avenue that we use to to attack it. I think you’ll probably see, or at least we’re going to pursue, the different avenues to get better.”
While Lorenzen is the first free agent signed this off-season, the Rockies have acquired multiple other pitchers in various ways over the winter. Reliever Brennan Bernardino was acquired via trade from the Boston Red Sox, Keegan Thompson was picked up via waiver claim from the Cincinnati Reds, and multiple arms have been brought in via minor league deals. Outside of the pitching staff, the Rockies also made a surprising intra-division trade with the Arizona Diamondbacks for outfielder Jake McCarthy over the weekend.
Lorenzen also provides the Rockies with an opportunity to begin rebuilding their heavily tarnished reputation among the players and front offices across Major League Baseball.
By bringing in a free agent pitcher on a non-bargain—perhaps even slightly escalated due to the Rockies’ home ballpark and reputation—contract, the Rockies have a chance to prove they are no longer in the “Stone Age.” They have invested significant resources into an entirely new pitching coaching and development staff with Alon Leichman as their new big league pitching coach. If Leichman and the rest of the staff are able to get results or even improvement out of Lorenzen—a veteran pitcher with a solid resume under his belt—despite the difficulties of making half of his starts at Coors Field, he could be a “patient zero” by spreading the word that the Rockies are figuring things out when he departs the organization. If Lorenzen performs well, he is more likely to be traded at the 2026 deadline than he is to be kept with his $9 million club option for the 2027 season.
Something else Lorenzen can do for the Rockies is provide the aforementioned Leichman a chance to learn and experiment.
Lorenzen boasts a significant arsenal of at least seven different pitches, representing multiple kinds of movement, velocity, and spin. In 2025 alone he threw a mid-90s four-seam fastball with significant arm-side movement, a slider and a sweeper with similar vertical movement but drastically different glove-side break, a changeup, a curveball, a sinker, and a cutter.
For Leichman, assistant pitching coach Gabe Ribas, and their new director of pitching Matt Daniels, Lorenzen represents a potential goldmine of valuable information as the team works to improve their research and development. Not only is his arsenal large, but he threw all of those pitches regularly. Only his sweeper was used—barely—less than 200 times over 27 appearances and 141 2/3 innings last season. Lorenzen can help the Rockies acquire data on pitches that will or will not work both at altitude and on the road.
A signing like Michael Lorenzen may seem less than extraordinary at face value, especially for many other teams in Major League Baseball. He is a 34-year-old reliever with generally good—if unremarkable—numbers throughout his career on an overall team-friendly contract to slot into the middle or back of the starting rotation.
However, what he may bring to the Rockies could be so much more. In the Mile High City, Lorenzen may quietly be a key piece to the Rockies’ new beginnings when spring finally arrives.
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“It was more of an adjustment leaving Coors,” he said. “My style of pitching, I’m an east-west guy, so a lot of horizontal movement. It was an adjustment to be able to start pitches where they should be, so I could bury a sinker in on the batter’s hands or not leave my sweeper on the plate too long.”
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After a season packed with MLB debuts. Thomas Harding takes a look back at some of the best debuts in team history. At the top of the list is former pitcher Jason Jennings, the only Rockies player to ever take home the title of Rookie of the Year.
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