Top 10 Most Egregious Moments in Coors Field Narrative History: Part 2

 

DENVER – There is a baseball field at 20th and Blake where the air is thin and the outfield is vast.

When things started to get a little bit crazy in the late 90s and into the new millennium, they employed a humidor to try to make it more like baseball in other places.

It’s still a park that favors offense but no longer perennially leads the league in home runs surrendered.

Runs scored, on the other hand, is a different matter.

As such, how often the ball falls for a hit or a cleat crosses the plate in Denver is met with some fair scrutiny.

It’s easier to hit in LoDo than anywhere else.

But just like I did the absolute last time I will ever go ice skating, there has been an overcorrection and the result is a slippery series of minor catastrophes that have left an embarrassing mess.

A narrative has arisen that puts every player who ever pulls on purple into an unfair disadvantage when it comes to getting recognition.

We are examining the Top 10 Most Egregious examples of this narrative overreach.

In Part 1, we examined several pitchers who didn’t get the benefit of the Inverse Coors Effect, noted that Dante Bichette was far too consistent to have been a product of the most volatile place in MLB and looked at how Nolan Arenado has been considered oddly average according to some wonkiness in the stats.

Before we get into the Top 5, let’s take a look at a few more…

Honorable Mentions

Andres Galarraga/Vinny Castilla

Andres Galarraga had a strange career. He was prone to wild swings in production (and also just some wild swings) before and after his career in Colorado. He was particularly underrated in 1993 when he hit .370/.403/.602 and came in 10th in MVP voting. While he was never that good again, he was at or well above average for all five of his years with the Rockies.

Vinny Castilla hit over .300 and at least 25 home runs in five consecutive seasons calling Coors home. These were by far the best seasons of his career so like Bichette he is often thought of as a creation of his environment but OPS+ reveals in hindsight that, again like Bichette, he was just a solid and consistent hitter. His marks in those five years were 107, 112, 115, and 127.

Corey Sullivan/Carlos Gonzalez/Gerardo Parra

It’s been well discussed before and definitely in this article that noticing Coors inflats offense doesn’t seem to extend to the pitchers. But what about the outfielders tasked with tracking down flyballs and line drives in well over a football field’s worth of space?

Stats like DRS and UZR are even harder on Colorado outfielders than wRC+ is.

We don’t really have a way to account for this or provide you with a bunch of data to support the claim other than that Corey Sullivan is rated the best by the fancy stats and isn’t exactly universally remembered that way. Carlos Gonzalez and Gerardo Parra got some Gold Glove love but still never got enough credit for how good their defense was considering all the debilitating factors.

Marco Scutaro – 2012

In 95 games over 415 plate appearances in 2012, Marco Scutaro, a career .277/.341/.388 hitter put up a line well below his average of .271/.324/.361 for the Colorado Rockies.

He was then traded to the San Francisco Giants where he proceeded to play in 61 Games, make 268 plate appearances and slash .362/.385/.473 for the rest of the season before crushing well enough to be named the 2012 NLCS MVP.

This highlights two important truths: How good you are at any given time at putting the bat on the baseball will always be more important than where you play, and Coors Field doesn’t make you automatically anything.

Not only did Scutaro not get a boost in his numbers but, if we don’t count his first two half-seasons getting his feet wet in MLB, he put up the worst OPS of his career in Colorado then turned around to excel in a pitcher’s park. His on-base percentage and slugging were both 20 points lower than his career averages.

Maybe he couldn’t handle The Margin of Air. Maybe it’s just too small a sample size and it was all a bit random. But if 400+ at-bats isn’t enough to get the benefits of Coors Field, why is it brought up for month-long awards or All-Star voting or even individual-season pageantry?

Daniel Murphy – 2019

If you need more proof of the Scutaro Principle, look no further than what Daniel Murphy is doing right now.

Career: .298/.343/.459, .802 OPS, 115 OPS+

2019: .281/.333/.499, .799 OPS, 90 OPS+

You still need to do nine steps of a 10 step process correctly before it matters where you are hitting.

5. Charlie Blackmon – 2016 MVP

.324/.381/.552 – Road: .313/.363/.563 –

Placed: 26th, Winner: Kris Bryant

Here is where we get to talk about the Coors Curse… The Margin of Air.

The main crux of our chat with Bettis had to do with the adjustments that have to be made once the club leaves their friendly confines.

It is often lost on the public at large that the Rockies have the steepest hitting challenge in all of baseball when on the road which makes what Charlie Blackmon accomplished in 2016 that much more amazing.

Slashing .313/.363/.563 away from Coors is damned impressive but sadly it actually hurt his numbers in a way.

Stats like OPS+, wRC+, and ERA+ work on a relatively safe assumption that more runs will be scored in hitters parks, and fewer in pitchers parks. This is by definition true but can be easily thrown off in individual cases.

One might assume that to account for each ballpark, every hit by every player in that park is given equal value. But it isn’t.

A member of the Rockies recording a hit in Dodger stadium will get a lower rating in each of those stats than a member of the Dodgers recording the exact same hit.

We discussed this in further detail on the BSN Rockies Podcast, but the math is assuming half of your production is being aided by Coors Field, even when you are on the road.

That means that every hit that Blackmon or Arenado or Bichette or Helton or Walker tallied on the road was actually de-emphasized because of their… home ballpark.

That makes zero intuitive sense.

The math on this can all balance out just fine if the player does what is natural and hits better at home. But if they don’t, they are twice docked for doing arguably the hardest thing in professional sports… hitting a baseball… on the road as a member of the Colorado Rockies.

Blackmon put up an OPS+ of 130 in 2016 and 141 in 2017 but the history of the Rockies actually suggests his 2016 campaign was more valuable because he brought a far rarer skill set to the team.

Furthermore, we are nowhere close to being able to quantify how difficult it is for Rockies’ hitters to adjust to dramatic changes in how pitches behave. As far as I know, there aren’t any nationally accepted and used statistics that even try.

Should Charlie Blackmon have been NL MVP in 2016? Probably not. But he sure as hell should have finished a lot higher than 26th.

4. Matt Holliday – 2007 MVP

.340/.405/.607, 216 H, 50 2B, 36 HR, 137 RBI, 386 TB, 6.0 bWAR

Placed: 2nd, Winner: Jimmy Rollins (.296/.344/.531, 6.1 bWAR)

In 2007, the voters did something that Matt Holliday rarely did, they swung and missed.

This is one example on the list that, if we re-voted today, I suspect the results would change now with a slightly better understanding of just how dubious one has to be when a Colorado hitter bats .340.

This era also sits near the beginning of the explosion of analytics that now help us better understand the game.

No one back then was using wRC+ to validate Holliday by pointing out even when you (harshly) accounted for his park, he was 51 percent better than lesgue average, one of the best marks in the post-humidor Rockies’ era.

Similarly, no one was checking bWAR or fWAR to validate the claims that Rollins was just that much better defensively.

Everyone loves a slick-fielding shortstop, and there is no point in trying to defend Holliday’s glovework, or speed, or really make this about anything other than the fact that he was by far the best hitter in the National League in 2007 and it had nothing to do with where he played.

This one is simple. Jimmy Rollins won the vote because people knew who he was and at least occasionally tuned into Phillies games that year. The Rockies were an afterthought almost until they reached the World Series.

Which is very much the point. So much of this conversation is about benefit of the doubt, a luxury the Rockies are almost never afforded.

If the point the voters were trying to make is that defense at a premium position is just that valuable, it was wildly undercut by giving Rollins the Gold Glove award over Troy Tulowitzki who had one of the best defensive seasons of all time and also lost his Rookie of the Year trophy to Ryan Braun who was so bad defensively he had to change positions.

Both Baseball-Reference and Frangraphs rate Braun’s defense that year worse than any season in Dante Bichette’s career.

Rollins taking home top honors in those two categories and Braun taking another while Holliday and Tulo were left out is the best single-year example of the kind of doublethink that is employed when evaluating Rockies’ players.

There is no consistent logic. Priorities on what matters most (defense, hitting, winning, etc) don’t just change from year-to-year, they change from award-to-award and the only constant seems to be going with whatever rubric justifies diminishing Colorado baseball players.

Also, apparently WAR sees Coors Field as worth roughly 137 extra points of OPS to every single batter who takes swings there.

If that’s true of every guy they had to face, our next two players may be among the most underrated pitchers in the history of the game.

3. Jorge De La Rosa / Aaron Cook – Entire Careers

583.2 IP, 4.38 ERA (53-20) / 681.1 IP, 4.65 ERA (36-32)

It’s a rare thing in professional sports to be in a category of two. But, to this day, De La Rosa and Cook are the only starting pitchers ever who can claim to have had consistent and extended success pitching half their games in Denver.

They are the only proof that the Curse can be mitigated over the course of several years. And their careers help put this entire conversation into proper context.

The Coors narrative is simply enforced inconsistently.

Record isn’t the best measure of a pitcher but De La Rosa’s 53-20 record at home shows a clear ability to handle the elements better than whoever went up against him on any given night.

Here are the numbers for some of the National League’s best pitchers for their careers at Coors:

Clayton Kershaw: 133 IP, 4.60 ERA

Madison Bumgarner: 100.2 IP, 4.56 ERA

Patrick Corbin: 61 IP, 6.20 ERA

Zack Greinke: 83 IP, 4.01 ERA

Walker Buehler: 31.2 IP, 5.12 ERA (5 starts)

Max Scherzer: 26 IP, 5.88 ERA (5 starts)

Stephen Strasburg: 26 IP, 6.23 ERA (5 starts)

It’s true that none of those pitchers have had the amount of chances to get used to the park that someone who calls it home might, but it’s also true that none of those pitchers has had to deal with extreme changes to their pitching environment 15 times a season.

In searching through the best pitchers of the last 15 years, the only visitors I could find with good numbers managed them in just one outing. Gerritt Cole and Chris Archer were among the few.

If this is what Coors does to the most elite hurlers in Major League Baseball when exposed for more than nine innings, one has to wonder what it does over the course of 583.2 and 681.1 innings.

Also, how much closer to those guys’ level were De La and Cook despite just about nobody considering them anywhere close to that level?

We may never know the answer to that question but if you’re inclined you roll your eyes at the notion that any Rockies pitcher might be on the level of Kershaw or Scherzer, then it’s time to start campaigning for every hitter on this list.

You can’t have it both ways.

2. Todd Helton – 2000 MVP

160 Games: 8.9 bWAR – .372/.463/.698  – 42 HR, 147 RBI, 216 H, 59 2B, 103 BB, 61 K, 163 OPS+

Placed: 5th, Winner: Jeff Kent

For all the frustrations over what happened with Holliday, he still placed a close and clear second.

Somehow, in the year 2000, Todd Helton came in fifth.

Despite leading the league in hits, doubles, RBI, batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and OPS (obviously) he couldn’t even make the top three. At 216 and 147, he had 20 more hits and 22 more RBI than Jeff Kent who came in second in those categories.

His 42 home runs that year also tied Jim Edmonds for the most among players who weren’t… let’s say… remembered differently by history. They actually tied for seventh place with 42 yakkers… what a time to be alive.

Now you might be thinking, that’s all well and good but even if the Coors narrative is overblown, you can’t just ignore it altogether. And you are correct.

Stats like OPS+, wRC+, and various form of WAR are designed precisely to account for these things. A much longer conversation can be had about how accurate they are but the general consensus is that, if anything, they are quite harsh on the Rockies.

Certainly, there has been no movement to suggest that any of these stats overinflates the values of those who call Coors home.

So, how did Helton do in these numbers? An OPS+ of 163 was good for second best among MVP candidates behind only Barry Bonds’ insane 188; a number it may not be possible for a Colorado player to reach. Kent was close with 162. Piazza and Edmonds trailed behind with 155 and 147 respectively.

Onto the big one.

Helton put up an eye-popping 8.9 bWAR season (8.3 fWAR) but finished behind Kent (7.2/7.4) who won the award and Barry Bonds (7.7/7.6) Mike Piazza (5.1/5.8) and Edmonds (6.3/6.5).

This was before the days when OPS+ and WAR were commonly used and we can clearly see that both Kent and Bonds had fantastic years for a team that won 97 games. But Helton finishing behind Piazza and Edmonds is a downright slap in the face.

If Coors Field is worth an automatic 2.0 WAR a season to every hitter, then Jorge De La Rosa is a freaking Hall-of-Famer.

Like most first baseman, Helton was never known for his baserunning prowess, though he was always a good IQ player who knew how to make the most of his limited speed. And even in that realm, Frangraphs sees his -0.3 baserunning value from the 2000 season as the best mark of his career and only slightly below what Bonds, Piazza, and Edmonds did. Surprisingly, he rated better on the bases than Kent who was the only player to score more runs than Helton that season.

And, other than Edmonds whose highlight reel playing center still runs through the minds of every fan who watched baseball in the 90s, Helton was a far more valuable asset on defense than any of the players who finished above him. He would win his first of three Gold Gloves the following season and remains the best I’ve ever seen at digging the ball in the dirt.

Perhaps the most perplexing part of this particular application of the problem is that this didn’t sneak up on anyone.

In 2007, until a run that almost nobody saw coming, it was going to be easy to sweep Holliday’s excellence under the rug and get little resistance since so few people were paying attention.

But Todd Helton was the talk of the baseball world at the turn of the century.

He began the year by slashing .337/.440/.663 for the first month, immediately announcing himself as a contender to be among the game’s best. And then things got crazy.

His month of May is mind-boggling and no talk of eras or ballparks can mitigate that.

He hit .512/.588/1.000 for an OPS of 1.588 over 23 games, smacking 11 home runs and driving in 26. He cooled off a bit, hitting “only” .315 in June then picked up the pace with a .340 batting average in July.

August is when all the Ted Williams fans got nervous.

It wasn’t quite what he did in May but Helton went into berserker barrage mode again and produced a batting line of .476/.548/.848 (1.395 OPS) over 29 games. The last time his average sat at or above .400 was when it was exactly that on June 10, but he entered the final month of the season batting .395.

Nobody had hit .400 or better for an entire season since Williams in 1941. When you are chasing history through times that include different mound heights and stadiums like the Polo Grounds, you kinda have to throw out all the “yeah, but Coors” talk.

This could really happen.

It didn’t. But one has to wonder how much difference it would have made if it had. They’d put an asterisk next to it in their minds either way.

That a player of this caliber came that close to treasured history and has it at all diminished by the ballpark he calls home is about as close to a sports tragedy as you are likely to find.

Well, except for maybe…

1. Larry Walker – HOF

Career: .313/.400/.565, 383 HRs, 141 OPS+ 72.7 bWAR

The case has been made at this point.

If you really need more on Walker you can read this or this or this or this or this or listen to this or this or this or this. It’s at the epicenter of everything we’ve gone over here.

Either Larry Walker is voted into the Hall-of-Fame in January, his 10th and final year of eligibility, or he becomes the most talented player in the history of the game (who was never associated with performance-enhancing drugs or banned from MLB) to be left out.

In Conclusion

The point of this exercise was not to relitigate the past though that’s exactly what we’ve done by definition.  Rather, the goal was to show that while almost any individual moment of potential bias can be explained away, when you put them all together a very clear pattern emerges.

If the Blake Street Bombers were “Coors Field Creations” how do you explain Marco Scutaro’s 2012 or Daniel Murphy’s 2019?

If Matt Holliday, Charlie Blackmon, and Nolan Arenado truly don’t deserve an MVP award between them, why don’t Jeff Francis, Kyle Freeland, and Ubaldo Jimenez have some gold lining their mantles?

If Larry Walker and Todd Helton aren’t Hall-of-Famers, then why aren’t Aaron Cook and Jorge De La Rosa?

Each one of these could be justified… but they can’t all be.

There is a palpable lack of trust in offensive numbers and no corresponding understanding for pitching numbers.

Other than 1997, a year in which Walker absolutely forced the world to overlook it, any and every excuse has been found to mitigate, obfuscate, and delegitimize the accomplishments and frankly the hard work of literally every single ball player to ever call Colorado home.