Welcome to Football Friday, a baseball column. Your weekly source for breakdowns and analysis of the hellish nightmare that is the Colorado Rockies.
Upon first glance of the week that was for Colorado, you might be inclined to think “they must be put into prison for their actions.” You wouldn’t be morally wrong for thinking this, however many legal experts have said that writing laws to arrest bad baseball players may not hold up under scrutiny from higher courts. Nevertheless, we have to wonder if society is ready to just shut the Rockies down for a minute so we can figure out what is going on over there.
The Rockies have won only a single game since my last post (and it was last night). They had 8 straight losses including an embarrassing home sweep at the hands of Pittsburgh. This was not a losing streak that you could attribute to like, bad luck or just some tough breaks. The Rockies are one of the worst teams in baseball. No other way around it. Offensively, the Rockies are the third worst team in the league in OPS+ (park adjusted OPS) with 81. The Rockies vs. park adjusted metrics debate is for another place, you can tell by the eye test this is not a good team offensively. They have gotten precisely 0 contributions from Yonathan Daza (.323 SLG), Zeke Tovar (.513 OPS), and the entire bench which has a combined .174 batting average (all stats pre-Phillies game). Pitching wise, it has gone even worse. Even after a shutout performance in Philly last night, the staff has a combined 5.51 ERA which is only second worst in the league because the Oakland Athletics pitching staff may be one of the worst of all time. Outside of Kyle Freeland and German Marquez, here are the ERA’s of their starting pitchers:
12.12
9.82
6.16
Austin Gomber spent Wednesday afternoon giving up five runs before the record low crowd of 18,000 could even settle in with a Rockie dog. He stinks. Jose Ureña has given up seven home runs in just 14 innings of work. Before last night, Ryan Feltner had faced 65 batters, 26 had reached base safely (40% of them) and 13 of those who reached base scored. These are horrendous numbers. Ungodly. They make you question if anything in this world can ever truly be good or just. The Rockies are just as bad as their record indicates.
On top of all of this, the Rockies continue to operate at one of the highest rates of Weirdness in the world of sports. This week in Rockies Weird they decided Nolan Jones needed some frequent flyer points.
Jones, a recently acquired OF prospect from Cleveland, hit the laces off the ball for the first two weeks of the Minor League season in Albuquerque. Six home runs, an OPS over 1.5, absolute monster stuff. The Rockies were hearing some pressure from fans and analysts alike to call up the kid and last Wednesday they obliged, bringing up Jones for some action after German Marquez went down.
Now, before we go into what happened after Jones got called up, let’s break down the roster move so we fully understand process. The Rockies had a starting pitcher (Marquez) get hurt, they did not need that pitcher slot for about four days (next scheduled Marquez start was after the weekend), so they called up an exciting young player who earned a few Major League games with stellar play. This is a pretty common move across the league. The Rockies did not NEED a position player, they called up Jones ONLY because his play earned a call up.
However, usually the move is, when you call up an exciting young prospect who earned a few MLB games, you give this kid some playing time during those MLB games.
The Rockies called up Nolan Jones, had him sit on the bench for four days, and then optioned him back to Albuquerque for Marquez’s actual rotation replacement Noah Davis.
It just begs the question, why? Why call him up if you didn’t think you could get him in for at least one game? Or even one AB? What is the purpose of having him fly in with the team if he’s just going to take batting practice and eat sunflower seeds? The process is flawed. If you didn’t need the slot filled by a position player why not call up a bullpen arm for four days and then burn their option? If Jones wasn’t going to get a game or two of action, why not call up someone else? It looks like, from my vantage point at least, that the Rockies had absolutely no idea what they were doing here.
Now, I’ll level and say I don’t know everything that went on. Maybe Nolan showed up and had a really bad cold. Maybe he sprained a finger on the trip and it just made sense to give him a rest. No point in wasting another flight calling someone else up so just have him rest with the big league trainers and then go back down when you’re ready kind of thing.
But that is pretty much the only other option here. If Jones wasn’t hurt or somehow otherwise afflicted by malady there is no excuse not to give him a single at-bat.
I have long felt that the Rockies are doing things wrong but they know what they’re doing. I don’t agree with it, I think it is a failure of baseball management, but it resembled an organization that was confident in it’s plans of failure. As I said in my Baseball Prospectus annual essay, the Rockies have a tree root in their kitchen but they’ve decided that’s just how kitchens are supposed to be.
This is a move that truly feels like a club that has no idea what they’re doing. They’re just floating in the wind making roster decisions based on whims and not fully understanding how to get the most out of them. The Rockies called up a young player in need of a challenge and gave him none of that challenge. They had him sit on the bench for a weekend and wasted his time. For what? They made sure to give Mike Moustakas and Harold Castro a combined 10 PAs while he was here so surely there was a space for Jones to see MLB action. It makes no sense, it defies process.
This move is perhaps a symptom of a grand issue within the Rockies organization since the Arenado trade. It is adrift. Lost at sea. Many old names have departed the player operations and scouting department since Bill Schmidt took over as General Manager and Greg Feasel as Team President. Perhaps their departure was truly a sign of the rudderless future the Rockies were in for? Normally, when a team is bad, you can point to things they’re doing in player development or other spaces to say “well, they’ve got a plan, an idea of what to do here”. I don’t know that the Rockies know what they’re doing. They may not even have a plan I don’t agree with anymore.
Back in the darkest days of the early 2010s, when the Rockies appeared equally adrift, Bill Geivett famously said “you’ve got to trust the organization” when confronted with the Rockies failures. I laughed then, I still laugh at it now. A shame that a decade later that quote is still an accurate example of how the Rockies fail.
I’m not sure why I have to continue to watch bad veterans like Moustakas or failed AAAA players like Castro take at-bats from potentially exciting players like Jones. The least the Rockies could do is give us some young guys to whack the shit out of the ball.
For what it’s worth, Nolan Jones hit a grand slam on Tuesday for the Isotopes
https://www.mlb.com/video/nolan-jones-grand-slam?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share
Dick Monfort, you gotta hand it to the guy
Over the winter, the Rockies owner Dick Monfort made some…let’s say slightly egregious statements about the San Diego Padres.
Since this statement, the Padres have sold out about half their games and project to sell out around 55% of them, cracking the 3 million visitor threshold that is usually the number we use for a successful turnout season. The Rockies have sold under 20,000 tickets more than a couple of times this year and have dipped under 19k for the first time in 10 years.
It’s a little funny that Dick has this talent to say things that immediately blow up in his face. The Padres haven’t even played that well! But they’ve been a pretty obvious sign that if you invest in the club, it will pay you back. If you want to succeed as a baseball organization you have to win games, the best way to win games is to hire good players, when you start winning games with good players the fans tend to want to see both of those things.
The Rockies are losing games with bad players. But hey, I think that real estate near Coors has appreciated in value.
Farmer of The Week
No this is not a celebration of our beautiful agricultural system in this country, it is a call out of a Rockies minor leaguer having a good ass week. This week, the Football Friday Farmer of the Week (Trademark Connor) is Coco Montes.
Montes is a 26-year-old middle infielder in Albuquerque that is ripping the hell out of the ball. Through his first 74 at-bats, Montes has a 1.124 OPS including 13 of his 27 hits going for extra bases. The former 15th round pick isn’t on the Rockies top prospect list but he’s certainly making an argument both through his rise in the minors and ability to hit the piss out of the ball that he should be making an MLB debut at some point. The Topes were very bad last season and this season they appear to be decent enough to pay attention to. Between Montes, Mike Toglia, Nolan Jones, Brenton Doyle, and a few other hard hitters the Isotopes are probably going to be the most fun minor league team for the Rockies.
That’s all for this week. See you next week. Share and subscribe below.