Jesus Christ, Rockies

Just in the colloquial sense. I'm not introducing them.

The Giants offense is bad right now. I don’t want to minimize that; Buster Posey has put together what seems like a very good pitching staff, along with a subpar lineup, and we’re seeing the results of that every day. He has essentially recreated the 2011 Giants, and while that team would have made the playoffs under today’s three wild-card format, it probably wouldn’t be the Giants team you’d most want to emulate.

It can suck to watch these Giants, just like it could suck to watch just about every team in the history of baseball. Sure, it would have been neat to be a fan of the ‘27 or ‘98 Yankees, but otherwise, every team has its rough spells that make you think, hey, I don’t know if this is our season. Usually it’s not! Very occasionally, it is, but you don’t know that during that stretch where your team scores 14 runs in 9 games.

But sometimes you can know with utter certainty that it isn’t your season, that your team is not going to do anything good all year. This was the case for the Giants in 2017, for example. That was a depressing, hopeless year. Just about nothing good happened for an entire season, which is honestly remarkable. Every prospect who got promoted flamed out, every veteran declined, and Madison Bumgarner fell off a dirt bike. The whole thing was a disaster from day 1.

The 2025 Rockies make the 2017 Giants look like baseball’s answer to the Monstars.

Now, here at the ol’ It Would Be Nice If The Giants Weren’t Bad newsletter, we’ve been through this kind of thing before. Just last year, we talked extensively about how awful the White Sox were, and a few months earlier, we covered the myriad failures of the 2024 Colorado Rockies. Going back even farther than that, we discussed the awfulness of the 2023 A’s, who did end up rebounding to Not The Worst Team of All Time, which was an impressive turnaround. Good job, guys!

The 2024 White Sox did not complete that same turnaround, finishing with a major league record 121 losses, and a winning percentage of .253. By contrast, the 2024 Rockies lost a mere 101 games, and had a winning percentage of a solid .377.

The 2025 Rockies are currently on pace to go 27-135, a winning percentage of .167.

It’s difficult to overstate how spectacularly incompetent the Rockies have been in every facet of the game this season. They have allowed more runs than anyone in the majors — the second pace team in this category, the A’s, have allowed 40 fewer runs than the Rockies, about 0.74 runs per game — and been outscored by all but one team (congrats to the Pirates).

As Mike Petriello noted in March, the top three Rockies starters were all in the rotation in 2017:

The Rockies somewhat famously emphasize character when they’re building their roster. If someone is a good citizen, he will get chance after chance after chance, no matter what the scouts say. If someone shows loyalty to the organization, then the organization will be loyal to him. This year, Bud Black was in his ninth season as the manager in Denver, and because the first couple were pretty good, he got a lot of rope before a 7-33 start forced the team to get rid of him.

But that becomes a liability when the players aren’t good enough, and when you look at Freeland, Senzatela, and Marquez, they are clearly not good enough.

Judging by FIP, they’ve all been getting unlucky, but only Freeland would be an actual good pitcher if luck and defense evened out. The others are various flavors of Don’t Belong In The Majors, but the Rockies are just going to keep trotting them out there, presumably because of some combination of misplaced loyalty and not having any options ready in the minors.

But it’s not just the pitching, of course. Here are the triple slash lines and OPS+ values for every hitter who’s laced up for the Rockies this year:

It is honestly staggering that exactly three Rockies hitters this year have been above leave average. There are park factors to consider, but that is wild. That is everyone who’s taken an AB for the Rockies this year. All but three are significantly below leave average.

Look, these kinds of things can turn around. The 2024 White Sox didn’t rebound, of course, but the 2023 A’s absolutely got better. They managed to finish with 50 wins, a truly awful number by any stretch of the imagination, but much better than the 32 they were on pace for at the end of May.

And now the Rockies are on pace for even fewer wins than anyone ever. One hot streak and this gets a lot harder to accomplish, but on the other hand, the Rockies have shown no aptitude for one hot streak. They are a truly lost, confused organization with no clear ability to get out of the mess they made for themselves.

Denver’s fans don’t deserve this. Neither do, really, the players, who are just trying to establish themselves on the worst team and in the worst situation imaginable. Ownership has no idea how to own a baseball team, which seems suboptimal. A lot about the Rockies feels suboptimal, but at least all season long, the Colorado Rockies have shown up to play Major League Baseball and then technically did that. There are a lot of disasters you can castigate that team for, but hey, they sure are showing up.