Colorado Rockies news and links for Monday, October 7th, 2024
With just over a week between the Colorado Rockies and an ignominious end to the 2024 Major League Baseball regular season, there are a number of questions as to what comes next for the beleaguered franchise.
After finishing 61-101 for their second 100-or-more-loss season in franchise history, there was largely radio silence from the Rockies over the last week. Maybe the team wanted some time between the stinging conclusion of another brutal season where they lost yet again to the Los Angeles Dodgers in sweeping fashion. Maybe the team didn’t want to steal any spotlight from 14-year veteran Charlie Blackmon, who has finally hung up his cleats.
On Sunday morning the silence was broken via Patrick Saunders of the Denver Post. Unfortunately for long-suffering Rockies fans, what they heard from the Rockies may seem like déjà vu with promises of a brighter future ahead.
“I’m not going to predict, ‘Hey, we won (60-something) games this year and we are going to win 95 next year,’” Rockies general manager Bill Schmidt told Saunders. “But we are going to be a better club. Our records (in 2023 and ’24) might be similar, but we are a better club than we were last year.”
In theory that sounds great. The Rockies are coming off back-to-back seasons with more than 100 losses, and fans are desperate for improvement. The problem comes from how Schmidt and manager Bud Black expect this improvement to come about. It feels like something we’ve heard every year during six straight losing campaigns: The players simply need to play better.
It’s no secret that strikeouts were a significant problem for the 2024 Rockies. The team’s 1,617 strikeouts were the highest total in franchise history while they tied the Seattle Mariners at 26.8% for the worst strikeout rate in the league. The Rockies’ 88 games with 10+ strikeouts also set a modern era record.
“We just have a group of guys now (where strikeouts) are more accepted,” Schmidt said. “But I don’t accept it. Our coaches don’t accept it. Our guys just have to do a better job of putting the ball in play going forward.”
“We’ve talked about it ad nauseam. We need to make better contact,” added manager Bud Black. “Maybe the roster changes. Maybe. But if a lot of the guys come back, they have to cut the strikeouts down.”
Technically, both Schmidt and Black aren’t wrong. The Rockies hitting core desperately needs to cut down on strikeouts in 2025. However, there is a frustrating lack of accountability from the team on the role the coaching staff plays in accomplishing that.
We’ll start by looking at hitting coach Hensley “Bam Bam” Meulens, who was hired prior to the 2023 season to install a new hitting philosophy.
Meulens’ first season with team bore less-than-stellar results. The Rockies led the National League in strikeouts and had the third-most strikeouts in all of baseball.
“I was embarrassed to be part of leading the league in strikeouts,” Meulens told Thomas Harding of MLB.com last offseason. “We didn’t hit homers. If you don’t hit homers, it’s something different. When you don’t hit homers, and you compound it by striking out, something’s got to change.”
Coming into the 2024 season, the goal for Meulens and the Rockies offense was to cut down on strikeouts and improve the team’s two-strike approach while putting the ball into play more often.
“We’re hoping for progress – decreased strikeouts, increased walks,” Black said. “It has been a talking point.”
The result? Not only did the Rockies set their unfortunate records for strikeouts in 2024, they were also significantly worse in two-strike counts compared to 2023. They were successful in drawing more walks, driving in more runs, and hitting more home runs with two strikes… but by very small margins. At the same time, most other numbers went down instead of up.
Meulens described his hitting philosophy as “a work in progress,” and some Rockies hitters such as Brenton Doyle and Michael Toglia did see improvement at the plate in 2024. However, when the hitting philosophy seems not to be connecting with the team as a whole, it’s difficult to see why Meulens should return as hitting coach in 2025.
The buck should ultimately stop being passed around and land squarely at the feet of longtime manager Bud Black. This is his coaching staff, and he is the general that leads the Rockies into battle.
Black may be the longest-tenured manager in team history and also the winningest manager… but he’s also the losingest manager. His .450 winning percentage is better than only the disastrous tenures of Jim Leyland and Walt Weiss. While Black did bring the Rockies to playoff berths in 2017 and 2018, the six-consecutive losing seasons from 2019 to the present day are far more indicative of his time with the club.
With Black at the helm, the Rockies have also seen some of the worst offensive seasons in team history. The top six seasons for total strikeouts all fall under the Bud Black era, as have the bottom four seasons in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging. At the same time, the last five seasons (2020-2024) are the five worst seasons by OPS in the 32-year history of the team.
Frankly, it’s baffling to have the Rockies as an organization consistently say the players simply need to play better when there has been one constant over the last six losing seasons. No other manager would be given as long a leash as Black has, and I can’t think of a single other team in Major League Baseball that would even consider bring back the same manager for another season after back-to-back losing seasons. While the Rockies haven’t exactly done a great job in filling Black’s dugout with talent, it also falls on a manager to elevate the players he is given to work with.
For whatever it’s worth, I think Bud Black was an adequate manager at the beginning of his tenure when the Rockies had a roster built to complete. However, I also think the time for a new voice at the helm of the clubhouse has long since arrived. According to the Denver Post, there are some players who agree with me.
“I have talked to several veteran players about Black’s future. They told me that Black still has the players’ respect and is well-liked,” reported Patrick Saunders. “However, a couple of players told me that a new, fresh voice would be good for the team.”
The future of Bud Black and his coaching staff is unknown and there’s no good sense of when an announcement may come. Black’s contract is technically up and it would take a new one to keep him in Colorado. However, it would be for the best if the organization took some accountability and let him walk away from the Rockies, letting a new voice take over an increasingly younger team.
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Here’s the freshly updated Top 100 Prospects list | MLB.com
With the regular season now complete, MLB Pipeline has released their most recent Top 100 Prospects list. The Rockies—having previously held six spots in the top 100 earlier this year—now have just three prospects on the list. The Rockies have two prospects in the top 20: Chase Dollander at no. 20 and Charlie Condon at no. 11, while Zac Veen comes in at no. 83 this revision.
Savannah Bananas coming to Coors Field on 2025 tour | 9news.com
One of the wildest baseball shows on Earth is coming to Denver in 2025. The Savannah Bananas drew Coors Field in their 2025 World Tour “City Draft” on Friday. The Bananas, an exhibition team likened to “the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball” will take the field in LoDo on August 9th and 10th next year. Fans can enter a lottery for the opportunity to buy tickets.
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