BSN Exclusive: The Rockies are losing games but not faith in each other

 

Baseball is chaos.

And if you are going to survive it, you’ll need someone you can trust.

The Colorado Rockies 2019 campaign has been littered with debris that they thought had been marked for the trash bin before consecutive playoff appearances in 2017.

They have simply played some of their worst collective baseball of the last four years and it is showing in the results that saw them produce the worst winning percentage for a single month in franchise history in July.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in all of this anguish for each member of the team is that there has been no fracturing in the clubhouse.

Of course, a group of prideful men who expected this season to go much differently have expressed their dissatisfaction in a myriad of ways both on and off the record.

Players have been frustrated over lack of aggression from the front office and the front office and coaching staff have been frustrated by underperforming players. Plenty of fans have had it with the lot of them.

Amazingly, no one has turned on anyone else. No lines have been crossed and there is a persistent positive belief in the core of this team that won 91 games and the National League Wild Card just one year ago.

But it isn’t the just the past that gives them hope. It is the future. And their faith in one another. This faith is symbolized in a literal act of trust witnessed between Ian Desmond and Ryan McMahon.

It’s been going on for “probably about a month or two,” McMahon tells BSN Denver. When one of them hits a home run, he will turn around and drop all of his weight into his teammate’s arms in a maneuver commonly known as a trust fall.

And it is called that for a reason.

If your partner in this act doesn’t catch you, you are in for quite the rude landing, especially when performed on the hard surface of a dugout floor. Be clear: they aren’t faking it or going half speed either.

“I told him, go as low as you can get and let me go as low as I can. Trust me,” McMahon says after embracing Desmond’s idea.

“We just decided we needed to be a bit more carefree,” he added. “Sometimes we care too much and we just have to trust that we can do this.”

McMahon has also begun a trend of a new kind of high-five consisting of only index fingers, saying he is “just over” the traditional variety involving the entire hand, opting to give one instead of giving the typical five.

The 24-year-old who wears No. 24 has always boasted an arguably perfect mix of attitudes that combine serious hard work and creativity for having fun every day. But there is more inside this gesture than an attempt to keep things lose and maintain one’s own sanity in a year that might drive even the most stable of people to the brink.

It is a tacit admission embodied in the name of the move itself that shows without a doubt that these guys still have each other’s backs. Literally.

Despite a season that has been marked by constant implosions by just one or two members of the roster that have decimated otherwise winnable games, there has been no pointing of the finger.

Some of that may be that they could ultimately point in all directions and everyone needs to hold themselves accountable, but manager Bud Black gives the lion’s share of the credit to his veteran core.

“It’s how our team is built and a lot of that starts with the veteran guys,” Black says. “Then the young guys show up to the park every day with good energy. We come out with professional pride and do our job and play the game the way it’s supposed to be played.”

When asked to clarify, he said that it is just a part of the fabric of the team, and declined to take much, if any credit for instilling this culture as a manager.

“For me, it’s something we don’t have to talk about a lot because it’s visible, to your point, so you’re seeing it right and our guys should feel good about that.”

Plenty of players have spoken both on and off the record over the past two seasons that having Black around as the calm and steady captain of the ship is absolutely a factor. Sometimes it’s what you don’t do – like having a big blow-up or throwing players under the bus – that goes the furthest toward helping maintain a peaceful clubhouse.

There are those who would love to see a bit more fire from the team in one way or another. Maybe even a big roster shakeup. And that may still need to happen at some point. Until that day, the only option they have if they want to pull together rather than fall apart again in 2020 is for the group to remain steadfastly loyal to one another.

Nolan Arenado summed it up nicely:

“You don’t want to have a losing culture and right now we are losing, right? So I think we can change some things a bit but at the end of the day, as a group, we are pretty close-knit, we get along really well. We’re not happy with what’s going on. We feel we can be better than this. And I think all of that is good because guys are realizing we can grow and get better.”