I think they might be. I don’t know what the worst ever record in major league history is, but the Rockies have got to be on pace to challenge that record. Already the worst team in the NL two weeks ago, they have run off a streak where they have gone 2-9 in their last eleven games.
Other than Carlos Gonzalez, their best player at the moment is a raw, unheralded rookie named Josh Rutledge who is actually out-hitting and out-slugging Carlos Gonzales since he came up from class AA. Other than that there is nobody on this Rockies team that is even mildly interesting to watch.
Todd Helton is clearly done and needs to retire. I am a big fan of Todd, but he is simply not providing any spark for the team.
Josh Rutledge is really putting the Rockies in a tight spot. He’s a shortstop and right now he is playing so well that when Troy Tulowitzki comes back from his recent surgery he might find the Rockies considering asking him to move to third base so that Rutledge can stay at shortstop. It is more likely that they will move Rutledge to second base (especially since they just traded Marco Scutaro, their second baseman for most of the season), but in the past year’s worth of baseball Troy has been playing more like a third baseman than a shortstop anyway. Having two power hitting infielders covering the left side of the infield wouldn’t be a bad thing, and neither Josh or Troy wants to play second base anyway. Both want to play shortstop.
In fact the potential power struggle between Troy and Josh might be the only thing left worth paying attention to for this year’s team. Oh, except whether they set a new record for incompetence.
They suck man.
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Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackYeah, I gave up on them a month or so ago… sigh.
Well, as it my usual wont, I did some research on the “worst teams in baseball history.”
It turns out that there are a lot of them. Prior to the “modern era” (starting around 1920) there were actually some teams that only won 20 games or so (the season was shorter then, but not THAT much shorter).
In the modern era there are two teams that really stand out as losers. The 1962 Mets (40-120) and the 2003 Tigers (43-119).
So, to avoid the ignominy of losing the most games in history, the Rockies have to win five more games, which would also guarantee them at least the third-worst winning percentage in the modern era.
So I suppose they aren’t close to the “worst team ever.”
But they suck. I mean, until I looked it up, I’d never even heard of the magnitude of suckitude that these Rockies have.
Interesting, the Tigers are decent now. Wonder how they turned it around… the Cubs sure never have.
Cosmic, there is hope. Remember what happened to the 1962 Mets? They built the most impressive pitching roster of the modern era (in my humble, expert opinion…nyuk), and won the World Serious not too many seasons later.
Of course, they had Casey Stengel up in charge of things in the bad days, and I don’t think Casey is available to manage now.
The baseball cognoscenti of Colorado have decided that pitching is an unsolvable problem. There is no way to build an effective pitching roster, much less an impressive on.
Roy Halliday, one of the best pitchers in the game today, is a local boy. He grew up and pitched for a Denver high school. When the Rockies tried to draft him, he outright refused to play for them, saying he’d play another sport if they drafted him. That’s a local boy who grew up at altitude.
The conventional wisdom now is that pitching at altitude is simply too stressful to the mind and body. The mind can’t deal with ballooning ERAs and the body can’t deal with all the extra stress pitchers put on their arms trying to get the ball to move in the thin air.
Good pitchers won’t come to Colorado and pitchers that come up in the ranks last only a year or so before the mental and physical stress completely breaks them down.
Last year the Rockies acquired four decent pitchers from other teams. The idea was that they may not be stellar, but they were at least proven workhorses who could give the Rockies innings and keep them in games.
All four crashed and burned spectacularly. One has already been traded, one was demoted to Co Springs (which is a cruel fate since Co Springs is actually higher altitude than Denver) one is on the disabled list and the last remaining of the four can’t get through the fourth inning of a game.
So they’ve, once again, mixed and matched and tried crazy stunts to get pitchers on the mound. They currently are “experimenting” with a four man rotation with a pitch count limit of 70 pitches.
They’ve lost something like 12 of their last 15 games and have looked terrible during that run. They lost seven in a row at Coors Field.
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