Only the Rockies could find a way to somehow fail sideways.
The baseball wonks up in the Grading The Week offices have been trying to find a foothold to cling to during this already-lost Rox season. When you’re 6-26 as of Saturday morning, that’s a mighty slippery slope.
One that’s made even dicier by the fact that the Rockies, who were on a pace to lose 132 games after Friday night’s defeat in San Francisco, aren’t even eligible to parlay all this awful into the No. 1 pick in the 2026 MLB Draft.
Or the third pick. Or even the eighth.
The icing on 2025’s cake in the face of Rockies fans? Colorado is ineligible for the No. 1 pick — or any pick better than 10th — in ’26 because of MLB’s new anti-tanking imperatives. That’s also why the White Sox, whose 121-loss season in 2024 set a modern major league record for defeats, are picking 10th in the ’25 draft.
Could 122 defeats — or more — be on the table in LoDo this summer?
Team GTW was skeptical nine or 10 days ago. But after watching these Rox up close earlier this week, we’re starting to come around on the “worst-ever” train. In fact, we can almost hear it huffing and puffing in the distance.
Rockies’ “historic” start — D-minus
After 27 games, the 4-23 Rockies were somehow a game behind the ’24 White Sox (5-22) when it came to lousy records right out of the gate.
From April 25-May 2, Friday-Friday, the Rockies went 2-6.
If they keep that winning percentage up — 18.75% — they’d go on to post a record of 30-132, which would assuredly set a new low that would be hard for any big-league club to match.
Keep in mind, though: Like 120-plus wins, 120 or more losses are really, really hard to pull off, even for the most putrid of rosters. FanGraphs.com’s computer projection as of late Friday had the Rox crash-landing at 56-106. PECOTA.com? 49-113. TeamRankings.com? 51-111.
That’s an average of 52-110. That’s not quite 132 or even 121 defeats — but it’s very, very reachable.
Why? While the Rox have more “talent” than last year’s White Sox, they’re also in an insanely tougher division.
It’s not as if there are a ton of fringy veterans who could be flipped to a playoff contender that would weaken the current core that’s on-hand, and CEO Dick Monfort and the front office are notoriously hesitant to move “franchise favorites” at the trade deadline. Only three hitters — Jordan Beck, Hunter Goodman and Brenton Doyle — boasted an OPS better than .700 as of late Friday night. The Rockies’ MVP on the mound so far is probably a 29-year-old middle reliever in Jake “The Beard” Bird, who ended the week with the best ERA (0.95) and WHIP (1.16 baserunners per inning) of any Rox pitcher to have logged at least 15 innings so far.
A few of the GTW kiddos grew up listening to Ken “Hawk” Harrelson shouting on WGN, so you’ll have to forgive them if some of his catch phrases and baseball aphorisms are burned into their brains. But one of Hawk’s repeated adages in recent years, especially years in which the Pale Hose were awful, was that an MLB club over the course of the season would almost always find a way to win 60 and lose 60, and that the finer points — your stars, your pitching, your manager — usually made the difference in those other 42 games.
Of course, then last year’s South Siders came along and blew Harrelson’s logic to smithereens. And when FanGraphs pegs every other team in your division to win at least 86 games, you’re arguably the No. 1 reason why.
Network schedulers — D
During their respective first-round series, the Nuggets and Avs wound up playing on the same day on five different occasions this spring. If that seemed like a lot of unnecessary overlap, guess what? It was. The two Kroenke Sports & Entertainment franchises didn’t share a single first-round playoff day in ’24. Or in ’23. Come on, NBA. You, too, NHL. Was it something we said?
