A Foul (ball) Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, in a city blessed with beautiful views, great beer, and a ballpark that should be a national park, there lived a baseball team. A baseball team that for some reason refused to get better. But this is no fantasy. This is the 2025 Colorado Rockies: a team underperforming so badly they’re threatening to rewrite the MLB record books—and not in a good way.
At 4-20 and descending faster than a ski lift in offseason mode, the Rockies aren’t just bad. They are generationally, cosmically, spectacularly terrible. They are on pace to shatter last year’s abomination put forth by the 2023 Chicago White Sox—121 losses—and are flirting with territory last explored in the 19th century by the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who “achieved” 134 losses in the league’s ultimate futility. 126 years ago. At their current .167 pace, the Rockies would finish the year 27-135. Damning. Damn.
What makes this decades-long car crash all the more infuriating is that it isn’t just bad luck or injuries, it’s orchestrated incompetence. It’s structural. It’s habitual. From the very, very top. No, not The Rooftop. It starts with Dick Monfort, the Rockies’ owner and Denver sports’ most consistent underachiever.
The Billionaire Who Cried Poor, and Cried Pour
Monfort has made a career of publicly lamenting the spending habits of more ambitious teams—koff, Los Angeles Dodgers—while usually investing a fraction of what it would take to be competitive. It’s a curious thing to hear complaints about payroll disparity from a man who built a rooftop bar in his ballpark instead of a bullpen. It’s true, it’s called The Rooftop, and it’s more popular and easily named than most Rockies players for the casual Denver baseball fan.
While the Dodgers pour cash into scouting, development, and elite-level free agents, the Rockies pour beer from the Rooftop. Meanwhile, the Rockies’ player payroll barely scrapes above one-third of L.A.’s. It’s like bringing a whiffle bat to a gunfight and bemoaning that you were shot.
But here’s the real kicker: despite fielding a team that oft-underachieves, the Rockies still draw crowds. 2.5 million fans a year, on average, even over the last two 100-plus loss seasons. That’s not just good—it’s profitable. That’s doubly damning. Because as long as people keep showing up for the snacks, scenery, and sunsets, Monfort has no real reason to sell, or even to try.
A Division of Dreams, and A Nightmare
The NL West is 2025’s baseball crucible. The aforementioned Dodgers are a juggernaut. The Padres throw cash around like it never mattered. The Giants are smart and shrewd. Even the Diamondbacks, with a fairly recent World Series appearance, are built for sustained contention. Each of them is performing strongly this season.
Then there’s Colorado: a team that has never—let’s holler this to the sky for the people with the brews on The Rooftop—never won their division. Not once. Their lone World Series trip in 2007, “Rocktober,” was a lightning-in-a-bottle confluence of hot streaks where the Rox rode a 21-1 streak into the postseason…only to be promptly swept by the Red Sox. Since then, it’s been a decade-plus of stumbles, slogans, and shunned stars. Sh–.
Two straight 100-loss seasons weren’t enough to trigger change. Apparently, neither is being the laughingstock of the sport in 2025. Denver sportswriting legend Woody Paige makes a solid case for relegation, if only such a concept existed. Maybe a straight swap with the Isotopes?
Not just Damnation
It’s not all doom and gloom. If you squint hard enough—maybe while shielding your eyes from the scoreboard—there are some reasons to care.
- Zach Veen brings energy and athleticism, a potential cornerstone if the Rockies can resist trading him for “veteran presence” and a bag of sunflower seeds.
- Brenton Doyle might not be a household name, but should be. He sure plays like he wants to be.
- Ezequiel Tovar has shown flashes of brilliance at shortstop, with a glove that could win awards and a bat that, on occasion, comes out of hibernation for long stretches.
- Chase Dollander, a recent draft pick, is the type of high-upside arm this team has often misunderstood or mishandled—but maybe, just maybe, he can buck the trend. Even Chase got chased coming into the weekend as the Rox dropped the both games of Thursday’s doubleheader.
There are a few others in the mix, but that’s still six or seven hopeful names in total. On a 26-man roster. Hope, like runs from these Rockies, runs in short supply ’round here.
Less Fairy Tale, More Fright Flick
Let’s look at a few numbers, if only to confirm your gut feeling that yes, it’s as bad as it feels:
- 28th in batting average: .214 AVG
- 29th in runs scored: 71 R
- 29th in ERA: 4.93 ERA
- 29th in WHIP: 1.54 WHIP
Amazingly, they are not last in anything, or even everything, but are making a strong push for both. Honestly, being ranked bottom-three across multiple categories feels almost strategic, if it weren’t so sad. Like they’re trying to be bad, but not so bad the commissioner calls a special meeting, or a Colorado Congressperson steps in.
Even MLB’s new anti-tanking rules have backfired here. Designed to prevent teams from bottoming out repeatedly in search of high draft picks, these rules mean the Rox can’t even fail effectively. They are too bad to be good and too consistent in that badness to get lucky.
How Do You Fix a Franchise That (Seemingly) Doesn’t Want to Be Fixed?
The usual answer is “sell the team.” And those cries keep getting louder, from the Coors Field stands, multiple blogs, and seemingly every available tweet. But Monfort shows no intention of going out to pasture.
So what will it take?
It’ll take what Denver has been damned reluctant to do: stop showing up. Hit Monfort in his cowhide wallet. Remove yourselves from The Rooftop. Purge the Purple Row. Root out the Rockpile. Make the rare national broadcasts have to talk about the sea of empty seats instead of the sea of purple shirts. Only then might MLB feel the heat to place some pressure, or for Monfort to finally feel corralled into quitting.
Final Pitch
Colorado is too beautiful for this. The fans are too longtime loyal. Because of that and so much more, the city deserves better than being baseball’s ba-dump-bump. And somewhere beneath the cost complaints and preposterous preseason prognostications from ownership, there might still be a version of the Rockies in the rubble that’s worth believing in. We may need another archaeologist to find out.
But history and mounting statistical significance tells us that those theoretically reborn Rockies won’t arrive without Dick Monfort relinquishing the reins. Until then, Coors Field is just a nice place to climb up on the roof, grab a beer, and watch strangers lose. And that’s not baseball. That’s purgatory in purple pinstripes. Damn damn damn.