2022 ZiPS Projections: Colorado Rockies

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Colorado Rockies.

Batters

If you’ve already seen the Steamer projections that currently make up our depth charts, you’re probably not surprised by the numbers that ZiPS predicts. You may also not be shocked if you’ve seen the Rockies in recent years, a team with an offense that has been buttressed by a couple of MVP candidates every year, now with those MVP candidates removed from the roster or in their decline phases. Steamer has the Colorado lineup a shocking five wins worse than the next-worst team, Cincinnati; the Reds are closer to the 17th-ranked Phillies than the Rockies.

C.J. Cron was an uncharacteristically clever signing by the Rockies. They actually sought out a type of player who may now be undervalued by the market generally: a league-average first baseman. The problem is that league average is still “just” league average, not something that is the foundation of a solid offense. Cron ought to be decent, Ryan McMahon still has some upside left, and Brendan Rodgers is probably the only Rockie with true breakout potential. Outside of these three players, there’s just not much salvageable about the offense, nor any particular reason for optimism about anyone in the minors in 2022 even moving the needle. There have been some genuinely lousy lineups in baseball that ZiPS has projected, but this might be the most depressing of them.

Pitchers

One of the odd paradoxes of the Rockies is that they somehow figured out one of the hardest things: putting together a starting rotation that can survive Coors Field relatively intact. A front four of Germán Márquez, Antonio Senzatela, Kyle Freeland, and Austin Gomber isn’t an elite quartet, but it’s a good one, and better than that of many teams that will finish with more wins in 2022. It could have been better if the effort to retain Jon Gray had been more serious; the general belief, as Patrick Saunders noted in the Denver Post, was that the Rockies would have been interested in a three- or four-year deal worth somewhere around $11 million a year — a rather unserious offer. That they didn’t give him a qualifying offer or trade him when they had the chance is a very Rockies thing to do.

If the front four is as healthy as the depth charts hope, the Rockies could again win 70 games, or just enough to keep ownership from once again having any interest in changing course. If injuries strike, the wheels likely come off the rotation very quickly, as they have as little depth here as everywhere else on the field.

Colorado’s bullpen looks like it will be toward the bottom of the league again, though if we’re ranking the team’s sins, this is a small one. From the Rockies’ perspective, an inexpensive failure is much preferable to an exorbitant one, and with so many problems elsewhere, it’s not as if there will be a whole bunch of wins for the relief corps to let fly out the window.

The Rockies are the worst-run team in baseball, and it’s not particularly close at this point. And the sad part of it is that this was a perfectly predictable thing.

With the talent they developed, there was *no reason* the Rockies couldn't become the next Astros or Indians. Instead, they look like a team that'll have a couple wild card relevant seasons and then meander off into the mediocrity mire meaninglessly.

— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) April 9, 2018

Until there is a drastic overhaul of how this organization is run and how they think about baseball, the Rockies are doomed to follow this same path. It’s not something that’s going to be solved by hiring good people on the analytics side, or even by a better GM. It has to be a whole culture change, and one driven by ownership, which is fundamentally the largest problem with the team right now.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2022 due to injury, and players who were released in 2021. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a big band orchestra that only plays nu-metal versions of baroque cantatas, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.36, similar to the post-June substance-enforcement environment.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. ZiPS is assuming that the designated hitter will continue in force in 2022.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article, or get angry at Dan on Twitter.