Just looking for some hope
Just looking for some hope
The Colorado Rockies happen to be my team, but I know other fans can relate to this feeling.
The Colorado Rockies are a bad franchise. Dick Monfort is one of the worst owners in sports. The front office is out-of-date in its methods and slow to change. Bud Black is a long-tenured manager with a career record that is well below .500.
The best player on the Rockies is Brenton Doyle. Surprising as his offensive production has been in 2024, Doyle is legitimately very good. He plays outstanding defense, and he might scare a 30-30 season.
Then again, the best player on the Rockies is Brenton Doyle.
So, here we are again with this team. They stink, one of the worst teams in the league. If not for whatever is happening with the Chicago White Sox, they would be at legitimate risk for the worst record in baseball. A second straight 100-loss season seems likely.
Is this team hopeless? With a month left in the 2024 season, what would a little bit of hope look like for the Rockies?
In today's Kanefabe newsletter:
The experience of looking for hope that things might turn around for your team, and trying to figure out what that hope would even look like. For me it's the Rockies, but my guess is this is a relatable topic for lots of fans of many different teams.
I'm glad you're here. On we go.
Playing spoiler: what is it good for?
September baseball has arrived, and once again the best these Rockies can hope for is playing spoiler and being annoying to teams in contention. Sometimes that happens, like when they defeated the Baltimore Orioles 7-5 this past Saturday night. Those wins are fun in the moment, but ultimately, they don't mean a lot.
What can be meaningful, however, is the sense of forward momentum that accompanies those wins. Or at least that's what you're hoping to see as a fan. In that sense, hope is hard to measure.
Sure, it might be reflected in statistics, like the production from Doyle or other key players like Ryan McMahon, Ezequiel Tovar, and Michael Toglia. But I think it's mostly about snapshots and feelings.
I might go so far as to say that it's about vibes, but I don't feel qualified to make or support any claims about "vibes" in the current environment.
As for these Rockies, I've been noting signs of hope as I've seen them over the last few weeks or so.
They play great defense. And they have plus defenders up the middle with Tovar, Doyle, and Brendan Rodgers. Run prevention is the ultimate mystery for the Rockies (more on this shortly). Something that has worked in the past, or at least been part of the equation on good Rockies teams, is good team defense.
They have played the best teams in baseball tough (at least sometimes). This one is really squishy, because over the course of a long baseball season, the cliche holds true that any team can beat another on any given day. But this season also has the White Sox, a legit walkover for playoff teams to pad their records. I've watched the Rockies at least be a pain in the side for the Dodgers, the Padres, and the Orioles. We shouldn't overrate the significance for a small sample of games in August and September, but it's not nothing.
The young guys are bringing some excitement. Doyle and Tovar are candidates to do something exciting any time they're on the field. Toglia is out there hitting home runs and taking extra bases. Combined with some other young guys who are in the mix, there seems to be a little bit of buzz with this group. If the idea is that they gel now to build something for the future, I think that might be happening.
Any and all of these things could disappear without a trace next year, leaving us with another stinky Rockies team. But if I'm trying to find excuses to grab onto a little hope, I think I see some with individual performances and the collective efforts of the lineup and defense.
Sidestepping the bigger problem
Now, I know what you might be thinking, and we're getting to this next: none of those signs of hope are on the pitching side of things.
That fact tempers any glimmer of hope for this team in the near term. As it is, the Rockies are a long way from solving the puzzle of sustained pitching success at altitude.
The one piece of the equation that has worked is obvious to the point it feels silly to say it. But it needs to be said, because it's not always clear that it's obvious to the Rockies front office: they need top end pitching talent.
Those not familiar with the history of pitching transactions in Colorado might scoff at this, the notion that even a hapless front office doesn't understand that their goal should be to get good pitchers. Presumably they have always done so, but I am here to tell you that it's not always the top priority.
Sometimes they prioritize style ahead of talent, obsessing over groundball pitchers for multiple stints in the club's history. Sometimes they speak about immeasurable things like makeup and toughness and so on, attributes that are important to other franchises as well. It's just that those teams understand where the intangibles should fall in the pecking order when they assess pitching talent.
Whatever this front office's philosophy is in terms of finding and adding top pitching talent, the end result is what matters. And that result is a Rockies big league team bereft of anything other than above-average pitchers, backed up by an improving but ultimately underwhelming minor league system.
So, in terms of signs of hope for the pitching, I'm not sure I can find any. There's still nothing that resembles an organizational philosophy, and there isn't any meaningful talent on the way.
If I'm looking for some actual evidence to back up feelings of hope, I think I can find those in the lineup and in the field. As for the pitching side of things, I think I'll have to indulge in some blind faith that has no basis in this franchise's relatively short history to find hope that things will be better anytime soon.
Hey, it could happen.
It really is baffling, this whole issue with the Rockies and pitching. It would be like if the Yankees spent most of their history with no idea how to handle the New York media. Or if the Dodgers had players consistently missing games because they got stuck in traffic. And then neither ever really committed to any kind of aggressive or creative approach to address their biggest hurdle to winning.
Never mind winning. What other team handwaves a challenge that's preventing them from being a functional franchise?
Long way from hope to hopeless
Aside from the specific names on the Rockies, which just happen to be my team, we can zoom out to discuss what we're looking for with bad and seemingly hopeless teams. I have a question I come back to as I watch the games.
Can I see any of these players as key figures on the next good version of this team?
With the guys I mentioned above, I think I can see it. It's still a far-fetched hope, because a big-league baseball team needs a whole lot more than a handful of guys. But at least it's not nothing.
Remember those White Sox I mentioned, they of the 31-108 record? As I write this, they have lost 11 straight games. If you catch part of their games, some of the routine plays might mislead you to think they aren't that different than the other teams in the league. On the other hand, I watched a few innings of their game against the Baltimore Orioles yesterday and saw two balls thrown hopelessly in the dirt by infielders.
It's more the symbolism than those individuals. Every team makes errors, but these looked and felt like the embodiment of a team that, at least for now, really is hopeless.
Maybe it's just because they have lowered the bar, but I feel better than that when I watch the Rockies. So much would have to change in terms of the structure of the organization. An influx of talent would have to arrive that is all but impossible to actually imagine.
I understand all of that. On their current course, I think they'll lose 100 games this season and probably next season. But there are those slivers of light to root for, and I have a new appreciation for how big the difference is between no hope and a little bit of hope.
I can work with a little bit of hope.
