The Colorado Rockies have found a way to make speed matter, and Jake McCarthy is right in the middle of it.
Acquired from the Arizona Diamondbacks in one of the new front office’s first moves, McCarthy has been so effective in purple that plenty of MLB pundits expected him to become a trade deadline target. Colorado decided to keep him around, leaving open the question of whether they see him as part of the future or simply wanted to wait for a better market for lefty outfielders. For now, McCarthy is staying put and doing what he does best.
That means running.
Baseball Savant places McCarthy in the 99th percentile for speed, and that burst has already turned into 25 stolen bases, 27 doubles and seven triples. He doesn’t treat baserunning like a separate skill so much as an extension of everything else he does on the field.
“I have to approach it just how I approach hitting and fielding,” McCarthy says of his approach on the bases. “I’m always trying to look for an edge, some sort of advantage.
I gotta trust my speed, understand what I’m capable of. I definitely want to err on the side of being aggressive.”
That aggression is part of the point. McCarthy knows the numbers only tell part of the story.
Speed forces pitchers to pay attention to the runner, and that split of focus can tilt an at-bat in the offense’s favor. When enough players can apply that kind of pressure, the advantage compounds.
McCarthy sees it from the defensive side, too.
“I think of it as an outfielder,” he says. “I know I don’t have the best arm.
And it kinda pisses me off when guys run in my face. I wish I threw that guy out.
So, when I can do that to someone?”
That’s the kind of nuisance factor McCarthy believes can wear on an opponent over the course of a game and a season. It turns every 90 feet into a challenge and every routine play into a test.
“I love the concept of taking maybe a routine groundball and I’m still making the infielder uncomfortable. I’m making sure that the outfielder has to cut the ball off, make a clean transfer, and throw it on the money. Things like that I think are conducive to good baseball.”
He’s seen a version of that formula work before. McCarthy said it was a major part of the identity on the Diamondbacks team he played for in Arizona.
“I played on a team in Arizona where that was kinda our thing,” he says. “Making other teams uncomfortable. And I think especially with the good athletes we have here (in Colorado) and our big outfield, I think we have to play into that.”
McCarthy debuted for Arizona in 2021, when the club finished 52-110. In his second season, he produced a career-high 2.4 bWAR and the Diamondbacks jumped to 74 wins.
By his third season, he and the team had reached the World Series. In his fourth, Arizona improved again to 89 wins but still missed the postseason.
Those teams were never the class of the league on paper, but they found ways to squeeze value out of pressure, athleticism and baserunning. The Rockies are trying to build something similar, though McCarthy knows there’s one major difference: Arizona had excellent pitching.
Colorado is still a long way from that. What it does have, though, is the start of an identity - an offense that keeps coming, keeps pressing and keeps forcing defenses to be sharp. The Rockies sure made that happen in Atlanta.
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