The Colorado Rockies are nothing if not dripping with endless irony

We are all experiencing a bit of 20-20 vision here in 2020 as the Colorado Rockies came into this series against the San Diego Padres at 20-20 with 20 games to play.

If you’ve long been a doubter of this team, your skepticism has been proven out in numerous stretches of ugly baseball.

If you’ve long been a believer in this team, your faith has been rewarded during numerous stretches of sterling baseball.

Are they the team that played three great games in LA and nearly swept those guys? Or are they the team that has twice in one week been embarrassed by comically lopsided scores?

The mind-boggling answer is that they are both.

They are currently just outside of a playoff spot after becoming the first team this season to take a series from the Dodgers. This type of irony has been abound for Colorado all season.

Just a few days removed from a loss of ridiculously epic proportions to the least talented team in the division, the Rockies strode intro Los Angeles having not won a series there since the middle of 2018, and they outplayed the bullies of the National League in all three games. If not for a wall-scraping home run against Carlos Estevez in the first game, they would’ve been breaking out the brooms.

Are they the 11-3 team that started the season? The 2-12 team that followed? Are they the team that loses laughable games or the one that hangs onto one-run leads and comes through in the clutch against the best team in baseball?

Yes.

Are they the team that never seems to make the right transaction?

The Rockies have caught a ton of flack for letting go players like Mike Tauchman and Tom Murphy only to watch them achieve success in their new homes. But while both of those players have reverted to what they were with Colorado and those talking points have dried up, Daniel Bard and Matt Kemp have stood out as major positives that nobody else in baseball had much interest in.

Still, there is no way of escaping that Jeff Bridich’s failures in free agency have turned the bottom half of the roster into one giant question mark.

So he must just be terrible at evaluating baseball talent, right?

Then how do you explain his almost overwhelming success at trade deadlines? Pat Neshek, Jonathon Lucroy, and Seungwhan Oh were all objective positive boosts in postseason runs. However this season turns out, both Mychal Givens and Kevin Pillar have been excellent, if still mildly underwhelming, additions.

How do you bat .050 in free agency and like .850 on trades?

Everyone brought in on big money? Jake McGee, Bryan Shaw, Wade Davis, Ian Desmond… all bad. Everyone brought in on a flier for a job and a sandwich? Greg Holland, Daniel Bard, Matt Kemp, Matt Holliday, even Tyler Kinley… at least decent.

It’s a team known for overvaluing their own prospects and hanging onto young players too long. But when you take a look at the productive members of the roster, almost all are home grown, and when you take a look at the unproductive ones, almost all came from elsewhere.

Of course, the central irony of this era of this club has returned; They pitch better than they hit.

For all the raw numbers, batting averages and runs scored, when these Rockies fall into a rut it’s because the bats have gone quiet. Sure, the pitching still experiences those blowup games. That’s going to happen when you have to deal with the most hitter friendly environment in all of baseball at home and then have to make a massive adjustment when you go on the road.

But for the most part, their starting pitching has put them in position to be well above .500 and the quiet bats have kept that from becoming a reality.

And right at the center of that is a new irony. Nolan Arenado has not been good at the plate.

For the majority of his time in Denver, the (somewhat fair) narrative has been that the Rockies are a team of three great players and a bunch of other guys trying to hang one and make their way. He’s been asked to carry the team, and at times has. All he wanted was some help.

While this is an oversimplification, it is completely fair to say that if their younger players had better or more quickly developed – either on their own or through better tactics and management from the club – this team would be in a much different position.

If just one of Raimel Tapia, Garrett Hampson, or Antonio Senzatela had gotten to their current level of play just a bit earlier, we may never have had the offseason blowup between Arenado and the front office that we got. And we are still waiting to see if Ryan McMahon can take that same step.

So, naturally, now that Colorado is getting consistent solid production out of those guys, Arenado has become the worst version of himself at the dish. Ever.

At some point, you just have to laugh.