Damn, the Rockies are awful

I am aware that I am jinxing today's game by writing this, but also, man, yikes

Let it not be said that I believe the Giants are a good team. Their run differential of -34 is the fourth worst in the National League, and tied for sixth worst in the majors. Their offense is clearly below average — not as awful as you might think, but still bad. Their pitching is also below average, and you can talk all day about how they should be better and they are good enough to be better and they will be better, but so far, they have not been better. And their fielding? By Defensive Efficiency, fourth worst in baseball, and I know there’s no such thing as a perfect defensive stat, but 27th out of 30 still seems pretty bad.

For some stupid reason, I have watched a lot of games that this team has played this year. I am well aware of their many faults and weaknesses and bêtes noires. Their lack of talent compared to the good teams around the league is absolutely infuriating. I have been there. I know all this.

That said, holy shit, man, the Rockies fucking suck.

It’s kind of astonishing that, just a couple days after the Giants left Philadelphia while everyone was thinking, “This is the worst baseball team ever assembled,” the Rockies have decisively proven this idea wrong. Because the Rockies are just an absolute mess. In the early days of the season, they didn’t get a ton of press, because the White Sox were just too hapless to allow room for anyone else’s ineptitude. But the White Sox have gone on a tear, winning 4 of their last 10. The Rockies, meanwhile, were already in a tailspin, but have gone into a deeper, faster one, winning just one of their last 10, including two losses to the noriously bad San Francisco Giants.

Oh, the shame! The entire Rockies team was easily bested by a team that hadn’t scored 5 runs in any of its last 11 games, and it then turned around and scored those 5 twice in a row. More to the point, the Giants had looked like a flaming bag of dog poo for their last two series, and then showed up in Denver like it had never happened, ready to face the day.

And the Rockies, like they have done all season, collapsed. By any measure, the Rockies are a bottom 5 team in both hitting and pitching. Hitting-wise, well, compared to the Giants, the Rockies have a worse batting average, worse on-base percentage, worse slugging percentage, and have scored 16 fewer runs despite playing in Coors Field. Pitching-wise, they have the worst strikeout rate by a mile (really, by 1 K/9; they’re at 6.72 and the next worst team, Arizona, is at 7.77) and the fifth worst walk rate. Their results are exactly as bad as you would expect.

If you’re wondering why I’m writing a whole newsletter on the Rockies being bad, well, yes, good point. But in 2024 it’s absolutely bizarre to see the Giants go into a park as the visitors and unequivocally be the best team on the field. For two days, we’ve seen that, and it’s been bittersweet, since we all know it’s not going to happen again anytime soon.

The Rockies fell into a trap that they’re not able to get out of. They were competitive in 2017 and 2018, dropped off to a regular bad team from 2019-2022, and since the start of 2023, they have completely collapsed. They half-assed being competitive and made some bad decisions (Kris Bryant) in free agency. But their ownership group and their fans had faith all along that the team would be worth following this year.

They aren’t.

We can bitch and whine about the 2024 Giants all day long (and, as we all know, I occasionally do), but they’re still in the before stage of the transformation that turned the Rockies from a run-of-the-mill mediocre franchise into something far more ludicrous. The important thing, though, is this: Do not take for granted that the Giants aren’t that.

Any team can turn into a catastrophic mess. Most teams don’t. But it’s always on the table. It’s always possible that a team can just become irrelevant and stay there for a decade or two. The Pirates did it. The Royals did it. The Orioles did it. There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel, but sometimes there’s an awful lot of tunnel before you get there. For all the deserved shit we’ve given the Giants and will continue to give the Giants all year, they’ve avoided the perpetual hopelessness that we see in Colorado. That may be the lowest possible bar to clear, but hey, half the teams in today’s Giants game won’t quite make it.