Colorado Rockies news and links for Friday, January 3, 2025
Another year is here and another season is on the horizon.
While hope certainly springs eternal, it’s also important to adjust the hope settings to somewhere between “not as bad as the 2024 White Sox” and playoff contention. Last year, I turned to Clint Hurdle’s advice as my expectations guide, lowering the bar so that expectations weren’t outrageously unfair and didn’t turn to resentments. I’m not sure it helped to expect the Rockies to be bad when they went on to lose over 100 games, again.
Even five wins more than 2023 would have led to a 64-98 mark that at least would have felt a little better than the actual record of 61-101. Instead, a 1-6 record quickly spiraled to 7-22 by the end of April. Colorado hasn’t been at .500 since April 1, 2023. By the fifth game of that season, they had a losing record that’s been the norm since 2019.
Hope was quickly extinguished in 2024 and Rockies fans were left with another long, frustrating season. Without much change and stuck in the daunting NL West, as Skyler Timmins wrote about earlier this week, how should we as Rockies fans prepare for the 2025 season?
As any sports fan knows, your expectations greatly impact how you gauge a game, a player’s development and a successful season. Where you set your expectations becomes the measure of satisfaction. The potential of a star new player or the mastermind of a new coach, or, sometimes, just the excitement of a new season, can raise the bar too high. If everything goes right, then it’s a great season, but it would have been anyway.
If the expectations are high, but the new player is just a star and not super, the coach laid a good foundation but needs more time, or the wins don’t come even if there is improvement, then it still feels like failure. The optimism transforms into disappointment. Like a movie or book that’s supposed to be outstanding, it automatically becomes hard to live up to those expectations.
Outside of the perennial hope that comes with a new season, Rockies fans don’t have a lot to be hopeful about. There’s a lot of evidence of another fifth-place finish in the NL West and even more uncertainty. Can Germán Márquez and Antonio Senzatela stay healthy and return to form? Can Nolan Jones bounce back? Can Ezequiel Tovar and Brenton Doyle continue, or even improve upon, their impressive Gold Glove sophomore seasons? Will the farm system deliver a new outfielder and pitchers to stabilize the rotation and bullpen? Can the Rockies just lose a little less and win a little more to indicate some kind of general improvement?
Will answering yes to any of those questions just set us up for disappointment? At least I’ve learned not to throw out Kris Bryant what-ifs. While I am still figuring out the right headspace for this season, I do know Bryant can’t be part of it as his contract set a great expectation that could never be met.
Instead of looking to Hurdle, this year I am going to follow the advice of American novelist and nonfiction writer Anne Lamott. Lamott’s work is full of great advice on many topics like writing, hope, courage, life and more. On Dec. 30, she published an opinion column in the Washington Post titled “What to expect when you have expectations: Sometimes, getting your hopes up backfires.” In the piece, she comically chronicles her husband’s cataract surgery, his joyful experience with sedation, his immediate rejuvenated eyesight, and then her own eagerness to have the surgery herself, especially the sedation part as a person in recovery for 38 years.
Unfortunately for Lamott, her experience is much different. None of it is enjoyable and the results are blurry and slow to come into focus. She realizes she has to do a reset after experiencing this “crash course in low expectations.”
In the opinion, she offers two thoughts on expectations: “I have heard it said in the recovery community that expectations are resentments under construction” and “A second line about expectations is that they are premeditated resentments.” This is a great thing to keep in mind as we head into 2025 and even start making predictions. Set unrealistically, they can fester into bitter anger.
Lamott ends the piece trying to set her up for making the best of 2025 and beyond. She says,
“So, so much that we love will almost certainly be stolen from us in the years to come, and we must not look away, give up or give in. But so much greatness will remain, in nature, art, best friends, our interconnection and caring, and we need to be on the watch for these — maybe squinting — and cheer.”
As Rockies fans, we can still demand more from Dick Monfort and the front office. Stubborn ineptitude will remain, as will the endless Dodgers bank account. But a day at Coors Field can still be great. There will still be beauty in a Tovar double, a Doyle diving catch, a Michael Toglia homer, inspiring MLB debuts yet to come and more magical moments we couldn’t possibly foresee. Plus, we still have this Purple Row community to commiserate with.
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Scott Oberg joins Rockies as minor-league pitching coordinator | The Denver Post ($)
After spending the last two seasons as a part-time pitching consultant, Scott Oberg received a promotion as Patrick Saunders reports that the former Rockies reliever will be a special assistant in player development, specifically a minor-league pitching coordinator. As of Thursday night, the Rockies had not officially announced the hire.
In an effort to provide hope for the 12 losing teams in Major League Baseball in 2024, Dayn Perry tries to offer a hopeful prediction for each. For the Rockies, Perry believes Brenton Doyle will deliver that hope with his amazing defense, base-stealing speed and an improved bat that will make him an All-Star in 2025.
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