The Colorado Rockies Have Raised the Bar. Now They Need to Clear It.

“Don’t forget, with every successful jump, you had asked for the bar to be raised.”
– Vineet Raj Kapoor

If your memory serves you to recollect back nine months or so, you’ll remember that last season’s Colorado Rockies were objectively one of the worst teams in baseball. Not for last year, but in the history of the sport. The Rox youth movement had a hard time for much of the season fighting their way out of much of any situation, and their 43-119 record had their winning percentage (.265) had them below .300 for the first time in their history. There were very few places to go but up.

This season has been a different story, but not as vastly different as the team might have had Rockies fans hoping after a 6-6 start to their season. While there have been several wins along the way, the team is currently 28-47 (.373) as they creep up on the season’s midway turn. Along with that, they again have the worst record in the majors. They are actually wildly outperforming last year, and are still staring up at the league from the bottom. What a bar to be barely clearing.

That .373 mark very closely resembles the .377 they finished up with two seasons back, making it their second 100-loss season in a row… last season then becoming the third straight. This year’s current tack would make it four. And while no one has the Rockies suddenly rising from the ashes to make the playoffs this year, that “not 100 losses again” mark would sure be a wonderful something to hit. And they only need raise that winning percentage to .389 to get there.

Sounds pretty simple, right? But what does that mean in the 87 games left for the year? It means 35 wins out of those 87 games, a .402 winning clip from here on out, which is suddenly a bit more daunting. It’s especially daunting in a division that contains the two-times-in-a-row-and-counting World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, currently rolling at a .640 clip, the .521 San Diego Padres, the .514 Arizona Diamondbacks, and the ever-proud and currently .419 San Francisco Giants. 28 of those remaining 87 games comes against the toughest division in baseball, and teams that look forward to playing the Rockies to stay healthy in the division. No small feat for a team that is trying to get back on it’s feet.

That will mean there will need to be a couple of winning streaks tucked into some unexpected places for this club, which has actually seen such things dwindle as the season continues, not increase. As teams have gotten to better scout this version of the Rockies, they have found more success against them. The hoped-for turn will have to come from Colorado finding a gear it has rarely hit most of this season.

And “rarely” is the right word there, certainly not never. As winners of two of their last four, the two losses were only 1- and 2-run gaps, where the wins were by 3 runs and a whopping 14 runs. It’s not as if the ability to catch fire is not there. They just need those sparks a bit more often.

So this is the right moment to change the course of the ship, if they want to just clear one more bar in their slow progress back up the ladder of respectability. If they are still on this path by the All-Star Game in a month, it may be late to try and get back above the “not 100 losses again” bar. It’s still not the playoffs, but it would be a tremendous sign that their long-overdue changes are pushing the club back in the right direction.