Through a series of ill-conceived roster transactions since his appointment as general manager of Colorado Rockies in October of 2014, Jeff Bridich has been the person most responsible for the club now standing on the precipice of total disaster.
It should have been a half-decade long window of contention.
Instead, we have this.
Bridich should get credit for having overseen a farm system that produced talent almost nobody else in baseball saw being this good. The core of Nolan Arenado, Charlie Blackmon, Trevor Story, German Márquez, Kyle Freeland, Jon Gray, and Scott Oberg all outperformed the “expert” predictions and gave hope to Rockies fans everywhere.
While tempting to believe Bridich was handed a group brimming with potential only to squander it, he played a key role in acquiring and developing each and every one of them.
And yet…
Almost every single move he has made to try to bolster this core has blown up in his face. For each solid additions like that of Greg Holland or Chris Rusin, there’s an epic flop in a Bryan Shaw or Ian Desmond.
In the short term, the former helped lead to a quick bout of postseason appearances. In the long term, the latter has torpedoed any chance of continuing to build rather than just trying to hang on.
Each individual move lies at the feet of the GM and Bridich has only exacerbated the situation by refusing to answer publicly for any of them and by growing increasingly combative with a press that is more than happy to return fire with fire.
The situation has become so toxic that local media is making personal attacks and fans are starting to organize boycotts of the team.
Then on Wednesday, Colorado announced they non-tendered outfielder David Dahl. One of the few bright spots of an increasingly gloomy team, the first-round pick became an All-Star in 2019 during his most recent full season of play.
And now, he’s gone. With nothing in return.
The Rockies did this in order to save about $3 million or half of what they paid Daniel Murphy to just go away this season.
There’s a lot about the specifics of the baseball economy in a post-COVID world that puts an asterisk on this decision. It would almost certainly not have been done under normal circumstances. That said, it highlights the much larger issue with the Colorado club.
As tempting as it is to fold this into yet another Bridich-Bash-A-Thon, GMs don’t cut payroll on their own just for fun. Especially when it’s a 27-year-old player in his prime making up a minuscule fraction of that payroll.
No matter how bad his moves have been in the past, they’ve been bad because of improperly evaluating talent, believing the team could get more out of guys like Desmond and Wade Davis than they eventually did.
But Bridich has never just parted ways with talent to save money. No GM does that. They are ordered to make such a transaction.
Putting aside the specifics of Dahl for a moment, and recognizing that his own misdealings are also to blame for the current state of the finances, it is worth asking a simple question: What would be solved if Jeff Bridich was gone tomorrow?
Allowing the fans to live in that dream world for a moment might sound nice… but then what?
The truth is, as long as Dick Monfort owns the team and insists on playing a key role in baseball decisions, it almost doesn’t matter who he employs as GM. He or she can only do slightly better or worse inside of a tightly confined space.
That doesn’t make it impossible to contend, and there are a few aspects of the model that have turned in some nice stretches of baseball.
This is the reason why every decade the Rockies do break through for a short bit and get their fans excited. It is also why each one of these spells (’95-’97, ’07-’10, ’17-’18) have been followed by long stretches of mediocrity at best.
Sure, Bridich could have extended this current window a bit more with better decisions, but the ultimate problem of whether they can hang onto Arenado, Story, Gray, etc. and whether doing so would limit their ability to build in other ways was always going to be a major problem.
Like in the previous era under the previous general manager, the top priority appears to hang onto the fan favorites regardless of the cost to the rest of the roster. It has also meant holding onto highly-paid veterans long past their expiration date.
The team has been loyal to a handful of players to a fault – Troy Tulowitzki, Carlos González – while treating far too many players who don’t quite measure up to that level as expendable. Now they’ve done the same with Charlie Blackmon’s mega-deal which has necessitated silly things like parting ways with Dahl.
The worst part, though, is that there have been the exceptions to the rule that make one think Colorado could maybe compete without constantly having to sell their superstars. But at every chance to do this, there is the owner putting limitations on the GM that make it next to impossible.
So they’ll continue to spend years cultivating more talents like Dahl only to not know what to do with it and squandering it away for nothing.
This doesn’t preclude them from ever competing. They absolutely can win in spite of their owner. Ever see the 1989 baseball classic Major League?
Or for a more real-life example, this own teams appearance the World Series, pretty ironclad proof that this club can get there with this owner, it just takes a whole lot of effort and (like with most teams in the game) quite a bit of luck.
Let’s also not get it twisted into a fantasy land where the answer is just for Dick Monfort to sell the team. First of all, to who? Is there a long list of Colorado billionaires lining up to buy a baseball team with zero national or global branding?
Monfort will continue to own the team and the club will probably remain in the family once he does step aside.
He isn’t going away, so he needs to be pressured to change tact.
If you are inclined to make your frustrations known and make your demands in this department, you can construct an email to Dick.Monfort@Rockies.com and just maybe you’ll get your wish.
Because until he stops setting these kinds of parameters on the team, until he gives way or retires and lets the baseball decisions be made entirely by the professional he hires to be the general manager or even the Team President, the Colorado Rockies will always be a team flying by the seat of their pants.
