Black and Purple like a Bruise: Rox Seeking Five More Wins and a Parade (of Perspective)

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.”
– W.C. Fields

If you’ve ever tried to assemble IKEA furniture without the tiny Allen wrench, you already somewhat understand the 2025 Colorado Rockies. There’s a shape we’re all aiming for. There are instructions, allegedly. And yet—somehow—we’re kneeling on the floor at 11:47 p.m., clinging to the slightest moral victory of “hey, at least that piece looks level.”

That’s where the Rockies are right now, and after today’s 9–5 loss to the Dodgers (who also happen to be the reigning champs), they’ve split a four-gamer with baseball’s big kids and arrived at the simplest, pettiest, most oddly endearing goal a fan base can rally around: win five of the final 34. Not to clinch anything, mind you. To avoid infamy. To not join the most exclusive, least desirable club in MLB’s modern record book. To be able to say, with a straight face and maybe a Sandlot beer, “We were not the worst.”

The math of microscopic triumph

Here’s the semi-cheerful arithmetic. After the loss, the Rockies sit 37–91 with 34 games to play. Last year’s White Sox set the modern benchmark for misery at 121 losses (41–121). If Colorado wins five, they finish no worse than 42–120. That’s still a neon sign for “tough year,” but it dodges the 121-loss record. And the wish has suddenly gone from looking impossible to highly achievable.

And to be clear, this isn’t some delusional leap. For the first time in a while, the Rockies are doing that thing good teams do: win 7 of their last 10. If you squint, that’s form. If you stop squinting, it’s still form. The official standings page says so. And today’s split wasn’t nothing. The Dodgers don’t give away games out of kindness; they are, irritatingly, excellent. (In case your brain tried to repress it, Los Angeles won this last World Series and has kept acting like it.) So splitting a four-game set with them is the baseball equivalent of hitting every green light on Colfax Avenue at rush hour when trying to get to the DNVR Bar: rare, uplifting, and probably not sustainable, but by all means enjoy it.

We’ve been here (and worse) before—just not this precise flavor

The Rockies have never won a division title—ever—and three things can be true at once: (1) that fact got underlined again this week when, deep breath, they became the first team this season eliminated from winning their division, (2) that says more about 2025’s hole than the franchise’s future ceiling, and (3) this season stands to be the worst in the team’s history by an order of magnitude. In a year like this, simple reality checks help. You can’t win the West if you spent spring storing your bats in the freezer. But you can reframe the year around the things that are still winnable. Like five games.

Seven-of-ten, a midseason reset, and the art of very small steps

Colorado’s year started like a horror movie where the first 20 minutes are just doors creaking. There was a mid-May dugout change, and the ledger now literally splits the season into “before” and “after.” The “before” was bleak; the “after” has at least resembled baseball you can watch without reenacting the five stages of grief between pitches. That split is in the coaching line: Bud Black early, Warren Schaeffer since. Bud had proven to be a decent coach in his past, but the shakeup proved to also be a wakeup. We’re not chiseling statues over it, but there’s a pulse.

If you want to get far too philosophical (and frankly, how else are we surviving Colorado baseball this summer?), the Rockies are doing a very human thing: scaling the goal down until it’s achievable. You can’t leap from “historically bad pace” to “pennant race.” You can, however, go from “are we about to set a record no one wants?” to “we won’t even tie it.” Sports are weird; the scoreboard has room for moral victories, too, as tired of Rockies fans are of just that sort of a “win”.

“Out in May” and other familiar postcards from the thin air

Let’s be adults about this: while not technically eliminated from postseason life, the Rockies’ practical odds were calling a Lyft sometime around May. There’s no shame in acknowledging that reality. In fact, it’s freeing. Freed from the tyranny of “mathematically alive,” you can enjoy the smaller storylines: a few kids stringing hits together, a bullpen outing that doesn’t set off smoke alarms, and the occasional series where the bats look suspiciously sentient.

And that’s been the vibe lately. The “7 of 10” isn’t a trick of the light. It’s the kind of small uptick teams hang onto when they’re 36 games out of first place and even a couple dozen games back of fourth place. You live in the trendline, not the table.

Five wins as a worldview

It’s easy to dunk on “meaningless wins,” but that isn’t always how baseball works for real markets and real fans, especially fans of the last-place team in the league. Avoiding a record like 121 losses is not meaningless. It’s a line you can draw between “we bottomed out completely” and “even if it was our worst-ever record, we found the brakes.” The 2024 White Sox will be a trivia question forever. The 2025 Rockies still get to decide if they’re a data point near that line or on it.

With five wins, the franchise can say: We did not become an historical object lesson. We did not make the kind of list that follows you into future broadcasts like a personal raincloud. We stayed merely very (very, very) bad. There’s power in not being a punchline.

Realignment: the rumor that dares to dream

While we’re staring into the middle distance, let’s talk realignment. MLB keeps flirting with the idea—expansion to 32 teams, geography-forward divisions, maybe even new conference maps—and any of these moves could shuffle Colorado into a pod where the path to “competent” doesn’t require slaying two-to-four juggernauts and an algorithm. Imagine more games against closer opponents, fewer trips that feel like NOAA missions, and a division slate that’s less “trial by monolith.” None of it’s guaranteed, but it’s enough to fuel a near-September daydream. A move might work like the upside of relegation, as the rest of the Rox current division is always ridiculously strong.

The kids are… at least interesting

We don’t need to list names to capture the feeling, as even the cast of who is hot keeps rotating, but there has at least been this: there have been pockets this summer when Colorado’s younger pieces have strung together the kind of innings that feel less like rescue flares and more like foundations. In a year like this, you collect those. You remember that development doesn’t care about your major-league record; it’s a slow recipe that usually (hopefully?) tastes better next spring.

Thursday’s game even had a “hey, that was fun” moment or two—enough to file the afternoon under “loss, but not a waste of clean laundry.” Against the Dodgers, that counts as an honest day’s work.

How to watch the last 34 without losing your mind – if you’re still watching…

1. Cheer for the number five like it owes you money.
2. Grade on the curve: competitive innings, not scorelines, will tell you whether the floor has stopped falling.
3. Track small arcs: a young hitter seeing spin better, a starter stretching to a third time through the other rotation, a reliever locating sliders with something approaching intent.
4. Laugh on purpose: the Rockies have officially lost the privilege of demanding your blood pressure. Choose joy where available. Dinger seems to, why can’t you?

And if they do it?

If the Rockies win five more games, what happens? Not much. No parade. No banners. No speeches on the steps. But something small and good, the sort of thing you can carry into an offseason without rolling your eyes: we did NOT become history’s cautionary tale.

Baseball rarely offers perfect endings. More often, it hands us a ladder and asks if we’d like to climb one rung. Five wins is a rung. It’s not much—but it’s not nothing. And not-nothing is exactly what this season needs. Or at least, it’s what we’ve got left.