We’ve made it to the one-month mark in the 2025 major league baseball season, and for the most part things have gone pretty much as expected. The incumbent World Series teams that were expected to be excellent–the Yankees and Dodgers–are leading their respective divisions. The teams expected to make strides–the Mets, Tigers and Cubs and Mariners–are on top of the other four. Aaron Judge and Pete Alonso are having stellar starts, Max Fried has proven to be a $218 million bargain, and if you’d combine the Cubs’ offense and the M’s pitching you’d probably have a superteam.
And even most of the underachievers aren’t all that horrific. The Orioles are back in the AL East basement after two consecutive post-season appearances with nary awin, but they’re a mere three games out of another playoff berth. The Los Angeles Angels are uncomfortable to watch most nights but in a division as marginal as the AL West even in their cellar spot they’re less than five games off the top.
And then there are the Colorado Rockies.
After an 8-2 shellacking by the Atlanta Braves last night at Coors Field, now in its 30th majestic year overlooking the spectacular Rocky Mountain landscape and serving as a beacon of LoDo, the Rockies fell to 4-25. Prior to that, YARDBARKER’s Kevin Henry dropped a calm, naunced look as to how pitiful that really is:
(T)he Rockies are on a pace to win fewer games than last season’s Chicago White Sox team that set the modern-day MLB record for losses in a single season with 121. Colorado, by the way, is also on pace for its third consecutive season with 100 or more defeats. The Rockies are also making history early in the campaign for all of the wrong reasons… only three other teams since 1901 (2003 Detroit Tigers, 1988 Baltimore Orioles and 1936 St. Louis Browns) have lost at least 24 of their first 28 games.
Colorado limped into Wednesday having lost 15 of its last 16 games, marking just the second time in franchise history it had dropped 15 in a 16-game span (joining the 1997 squad, which struggled mightily from July 1-19).
It’s not that Colorado has all that fantastic a legacy to live up in their history; they’ve had just five post-season appearances over their previous 32 seasons. The one time they advanced beyond the Division Series they completed a bizarre run through the National League playoffs with seven consecutive wins over the Phillies and Diamondbacks, before then being swept by the Red Sox in the World Series after being idle a week while Boston battled through a rough seven-game set in the American League.
At least when they’d lose in the past they’d be entertaining games; the Mile High air and the throwback dimensions of Coors would regularly produce high-scoring games. One could comfortably draft a Rockie or two on one’s fantasy team and know they were an intriguing play on a homestand. But as Henry reminds, even that’s not the case this year:
Gone (for now) are the days when opponents expected high-scoring games inside Coors Field. In their 13 home games, the Rockies are slashing just .241/.326/.418 with 135 strikeouts, the most in the first 13 games of the season at home in franchise history.
Third baseman Ryan McMahon, last year’s lone All-Star selection for the Rockies, is 0-for-23 over his last seven games. Center fielder Brenton Doyle, inserted into the top of the lineup to kickstart the offense after Charlie Blackmon’s retirement at the end of last season, is 1-for-22 in his last seven games. Ezequiel Tovar has been on the injured list since April 16 with a left hip contusion. However, before he was injured, the 23-year-old shortstop, who hit 26 homers last season, has no homers and was slashing .212/.257/.303 through his first 66 at-bats.
Yeah, it’s THAT bad. Were this a market and franchise with more emotional fans and a deeper history of success, there might be an awful lot of bitter feelings being conveyed. Heck, the Mets fan boards are rampant with meltdowns even though they’ve won 70 per cent of the time and currently sport the best record in MLB. Rockies fan boards–far less. Maybe it’s all that access to legal weed that calms the nerves.
That said, there are at least some observers, such as HEAVY’s Alvin Garcia, that are sounding the alarm for something to be done:
This isn’t just a bad year. It’s part of a disturbing trend that’s starting to become a serious black eye for MLB. Years of poor drafting, questionable contracts, and a middling farm system have finally caught up. Despite the hitter-friendly atmosphere of Coors Field, Colorado ranks dead last in adjusted OPS. Their pitching — always a challenge at altitude — leaks runs at a historic rate. Defense? Statistically, it’s the worst in baseball.
When a team becomes this uncompetitive, the entire league suffers. Fans lose interest, players lose hope, and baseball’s broader credibility suffers. In European soccer, relegation ensures that clubs that finish at the bottom are demoted to a lower league. It’s brutal, but it forces accountability. There is no coasting, no multi-year rebuild excuses. Imagine if MLB adopted a similar system.
Realistically, American sports aren’t built for promotion and relegation — there’s no second division ready to step up. But the concept deserves serious thought. A future MLB model could feature a second-tier competition with promotion/relegation elements. Or perhaps it’s time to introduce heavy financial penalties beyond small revenue-sharing losses.
I’d actually offer that perhaps the timing is righter than rain for those idle thoughts to be taken seriously.
We already have two MLB teams playing in minor league ballparks, one in a stadium it shares with a Triple A team. The leading Triple A teams in their respective leagues at this writing are in Jacksonville and Oklahoma City. Markets big enough to have track records and media infrastructues good enough for the NFL and the NBA.
Maybe Ryan Reynolds wants to make an investment in one of them to upgrade their locker rooms and floodlights the way the A’s and Rays’ homes were made acceptable. His Wrexham team has just earned promotion to the equivalent of Triple A in England and the fifth season of their adorable FX series will be dropping next month, just in time for Emmy consideration. 
I gotta believe there’d be more interest in that kind of a story than the one unfolding in Denver. When the highlight of your season is the unveiling of some new threads with a color scheme that actually matches the one they’ve used since their inception, the bar for improvement is kinda low.
Otherwise, you’re running the risk of reactions like the one Garcia concluded his piece with:
The Colorado Rockies might stumble into the record books for all the wrong reasons this season. But if it happens, the bigger stain will be on Major League Baseball itself — for allowing this trend to fester unchecked…doing nothing will only accelerate the decay of fan trust and competitive integrity across the sport.
I guess we now know why he works for a site called HEAVY. Chill out, dude.
Courage…