The Colorado Rockies have stumbled into a rare offensive note: three qualified hitters all sitting above an .800 OPS. TJ Rumfield is at .841, Hunter Goodman at .832 and Jake McCarthy at .820, giving Colorado a trio it hasn’t had since 2019.
That earlier group was Nolan Arenado, Charlie Blackmon and Trevor Story, and the gap between those two versions of the Rockies tells you plenty about where this team stands now.
In 2019, Colorado was coming off a 91-win season and a trip to the NLDS. The finish was ugly - a sweep by the Milwaukee Brewers - but the overall shape of the season suggested a club on the rise rather than one headed backward.
The lineup backed up that optimism. Arenado crushed 41 home runs and put together a seven-WAR season.
Story chipped in 38 doubles, 35 homers and nearly seven WAR himself. Blackmon piled up 182 hits and 42 doubles, even with his defense in right field dragging down his overall WAR.
That offense helped Colorado finish ninth in team OPS at .782, second in doubles with 323 and fourth in hits with 1502. But the record never matched the firepower.
The Rockies won only 71 games, and the reason was hard to miss: the pitching staff collapsed. Colorado posted the second-worst ERA in baseball at 5.56 and gave up the second-most home runs at 270.
After Arenado, Story and Blackmon, David Dahl was the only other regular starter to finish with an OPS+ above 100.
So while the 2019 Rockies had elite top-end bats, they still couldn’t paper over everything else. Baseball doesn’t work that way.
This year’s club is nowhere close in the standings, but the lineup has shown more spread-out production than that 2019 group. Behind Goodman, Rumfield and McCarthy, Colorado has gotten help from Kyle Karros, Cole Carrigg and Mickey Moniak. The pitching, though, remains a mess, with the staff ERA sitting almost exactly where it was in 2019.
There’s still a long way to go before any talk of contention makes sense. But at least on offense, the Rockies look like a team with more than just a few bright spots.
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Robinson Cancels hand in it matters too. The Hartford manager has built a reputation for teaching and communication, and that seems to be showing up in the way players are performing and growing within the system. For the Rockies, the intrigue is not just that Hartford is winning right now, but that several players are doing more than filling innings and at-bats, they are changing the conversation about what this part of the pipeline can produce. [Read more 🡒]