In their team by team season preview series each year Effectively Wild asks “what would constitute a success for
While winning the World Series would be seen as a success for any team, most are not in a position where that would be plausible. For those teams, some other benchmark, if met, would still have to be considered an overall good outcome.
For the 2026 iteration of their Rockies preview, guest Patrick Lyons answered the question with: Not losing 100 games.
On the surface I think this
is a sensible answer. Given the state of the organization last season, however, I don’t think major league wins are the most important factor in the long-term health of the club. That, I believe, depends mainly on the following:
- A better development pipeline: You need look no further than the lack of performance from the past decade of first round draft selections the Rockies have made to conclude that their development practices haven’t been working.
- Improved technological infrastructure: The Rockies have been so willingly behind the times that they were reportedly restricting players even throwing bullpens in front of trackman units. This is an area in which they have clear needs.
- An influx of new talent: While the Rockies likely have more talent than is currently obvious (due to poor development practices), it would be hard to argue that they have enough in house to be able to field a contending team.
Most of that is hard to measure from an outside perspective. We’ll have a chance to do our own assessment of the new talent they bring in over the course of the season, but we are likely never going to know how the Rockies use of tech or development plans compare to other organizations in more than vague terms.
If we can’t directly know to what degree these goals have been achieved, we need to look to a downstream indicator of if/how those things have changed.
This brings us to:
Farm System Ranking
Coming into the 2026 season, here’s where the Rockies farm ranks among public prospect evaluators:
- Baseball America: 30th
- Baseball Prospectus: 25th
- ESPN: 28th
- MLB Pipeline: 27th
- The Athletic: 23rd
Given their poor major league performance for the past half decade, the Rockies have had every opportunity to rank highly on these lists. Regardless of how much you value the analysis of any one of those evaluators, the consensus among them being that the Rockies are — at best — a bottom-third team when it comes to prospect talent is damning.
These poor rankings indicate that the Rockies either haven’t selected talented players or developed them particularly well, both of which have been hampered by their lack of technological infrastructure. You see where I’m going with this.
If the factors for a successful 2026 season posited in the into are improved that should be seen in their farm system being ranked more favorably moving forward.
The good news is, the 2026 Rockies will continue to have plenty of opportunities to test this:
- The Draft: The Rockies have five picks in the top 104 selections of the 2026 draft, which will be backed up by what is sure to be a top-ten bonus pool.
- Trade Candidates: The new front office held off on selling low on most of the major league players they inherited this offseason. They will almost certainly enter the trade deadline as clear sellers with close to an entire roster of potentially tradable players.
- Existing Raw Tools: The farm system is already littered with players with big raw tools hampered by question marks as to whether they will actually be able to access them (Ethan Holliday, Brody Brecht, Robert Calaz, Jackson Cox, etc.).
This should be a perfect confluence of needs and means. The big question is how quickly they can execute on improvements to the organization.
Conclusion
All that said, my pitch for what would constitute a successful season for the 2026 Colorado Rockies is this:
A consensus top 15 farm system in the league next offseason.
That may seem steep, but given the number of favorable opportunities available, it is plausible. If the Rockies can do that, 2026 will be a resounding success in my book regardless of how many losses the major league team ends up with.
What about you? Is there some other metric or benchmark that you’ll be using to measure the season? Let us know in the comments.
What to know about Rockies-Marlins Opening Day (Fri., 7:10 p.m. ET) | MLB.com
While most of the league will have played their first game of the season today, the Rockies will need to wait until tomorrow. Thomas Harding and Christina De Nicola offer up a very full breakdown of everything you’ll want to know heading into Rockies Opening day game.
Kevin Henry talks to Jake McCarthy about how he’s transitioned after being traded to the Rockies this offseason. It’s a wide ranging piece going over the parallels he sees between his career and the recent Rockies teams. The real draw, however, is an anecdote McCarthy shares about how early this spring he would drive through the Diamondbacks side of camp at 6:30 in the morning and “lay on the horn” to get a response out of his old teammates.
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