Colorado Rockies set MLB record for most losses in April

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In the handshake line on Wednesday, Colorado Rockies center fielder stopped to hug rookie Zach Agnos. It had been Doyle’s go-ahead home run that made possible Agnos’s first career save, and so the Rockies got to do what they hadn’t done in a while.

They got to celebrate.

“We needed a game like this to win,” manager Bud Black told reporters postgame, “because obviously we’re not scoring a lot of runs.”

There’s a lot about the Rockies that speaks for itself at the moment. The team has existed for 33 years, and rarely have the Rockies been particularly good, but never had they been especially awful. Until now.

Wednesday’s 2-1 win against the Atlanta Braves snapped an eight-game losing streak, but still, the Rockies are just 5-25. It’s the worst record in the majors and the most losses ever at the end of April. Even last year’s Chicago White Sox, who finished with the worst regular season record in modern baseball history, had six wins by the end of April.

That White Sox team went on to lose 121 games. These Rockies are on pace to lose 135.

Such a historic pace marks a low point — for now — in a four-year fall from general mediocrity to outright futility. The Rockies have been bad, but never this bad. The team with mountains on its logo has become a pushover, and they’re falling harder than ever.

In three-plus decades, the Rockies have had only nine winning seasons. They’ve finished higher than fourth in their division only 11 times, they’ve never won the NL West, and they were swept in their only World Series appearance.

But as recently as 2021, the Rockies had nearly as many playoff appearances (5) as last-place finishes (6). They’d never lost 100 games in a season until 2023, and in their first three decades — from their inception in 1993 to their typically underwhelming finish in 2022 — the Rockies accumulated more wins than the Kansas City Royals, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers, Miami Marlins or Baltimore Orioles. Their payroll typically ranks somewhere in the middle third of Major League organizations.

Theirs was not a decorated history, but the Rockies were not perpetual doormats. Larry Walker won an MVP with the Rockies in 1997, a homegrown core got them to the World Series in 2007, and Todd Helton is enshrined in Cooperstown with a Rockies cap on his Hall of Fame plaque. The Rockies typically have been underwhelming, but they’ve remained reasonably competitive. Drafting and developing enough hitters to make up for their notoriously difficult pitching environment, the Rockies went to the playoffs four times between 2007 and 2018.

That 2018 season, though — when Nolan Arenado, Charlie Blackmon and Trevor Story were All-Stars, DJ LeMahieu won a Gold Glove, and Kyle Freeland finished fourth in Cy Young voting — now stands as a turning point. The Rockies have not been good since. They have the most losses in baseball since 2019 and are working toward their fourth straight last-place finish (they’d only once before finished in the basement twice in a row). After never losing 100 games in any of their first 30 seasons, the Rockies have now lost 100 in back-to-back seasons, and only a remarkable turnaround could keep them from losing 100 again this year. The industry has come to expect the Rockies to lose, but this opening month has been worse than anticipated.

On Opening Day, FanGraphs gave the Rockies a 0.1 percent chance of making the playoffs and projected them to lose 99 games, but still, the Rockies went into their season opener wearing matching t-shirts during batting practice. The shirts showed center fielder Doyle and shortstop Ezequiel Tovar. Gold Glove winners each. Young players on the rise. Hope and optimism emblazoned on short-sleeved cotton.

But so far, only two Rockies hitters — Jordan Beck and Hunter Goodman — have produced above-league-average offensive numbers. Those two and Doyle are the only Rockies position players FanGraphs considers to be above replacement level. Tovar, Kris Bryant, and Thairo Estrada are on the IL.  And when the offense is struggling like that, it’s hard for the pitching to keep up. Hitting typically has been the Rockies’ strength while Colorado has been notoriously difficult for pitchers, and so it’s little surprise the Rockies have the third-highest ERA in baseball. Of the 13 Major League pitchers to have already accumulated four losses this season, three are in the Rockies rotation, and rookie Chase Dollanger won on Wednesday to avoid becoming the fourth. Keith Law ranks the Rockies farm system 23rd in the majors, leaving little reason to think massive help is on the way.

“Guys are angry. Guys are pissed. All the adjectives you want to throw out there,” Black said. “These guys are professional baseball players who want to win games and want to do well, and it just hasn’t happened as a group. We just don’t have enough guys playing well.”

The Rockies nearly won their season opener but blew a late lead and suffered a walk-off. They went on to win only one of their first eight games. Wednesday was only their second win since April 11, and they have yet to win two games in a row. They’re 1-14 on the road, 2-6 in one-run games, and 0-6 in their own division. They have the worst run differential in baseball by a huge margin.

For more than three decades, the Rockies never had the best record in baseball, but they also never had the worst. They’re on pace to change that in historic fashion this season.

(Photo of manager Bud Black: Justin Edmonds / Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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