2023 ZiPS Projections: Colorado Rockies

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Colorado Rockies.

Batters

There are a lot of problems with the Colorado Rockies as an organization, but I think the biggest one is different than what ails most other poorly run franchises. It’s not parsimony; while the Rockies aren’t exactly the Mets, with a projected 2023 payroll around $163 million, they’re not the Pirates or the Marlins either. Playing in Coors make things trickier, but the team’s already shown they can find viable starting pitching — the biggest challenge in an environment like Denver — and they play in a beautiful park and city, and get consistent fan support. It isn’t even necessarily an analytics problem. While the top levels of the org clearly aren’t on board with the ways modern front offices think about the game — they have a department with sky-high employee churn — this is more a symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself. The problem that plagues the Rockies is a lack of imagination.

What do I mean by imagination? With most bad teams, you can imagine the scenario in which they’re good. The Orioles looked like a pretty lousy club entering the 2022 season, but they also had the most high-upside minor league talent in baseball. The Reds have several young pitchers with impressive physical tools, while the Pirates have some interesting starters to go along with some good prospects and young big leaguers at key defensive positions. But if you look at the Rockies, especially the offense, there just isn’t ambition there. While it’s bad that this group projects as one of the worst lineups in the league, it’s even worse that they project as having the lowest variance of any team I’ve projected so far this offseason. It’s a bit like buying a lottery ticket; almost every time you play Powerball, you’re going to be a loser, but if you hit it big, you become fabulously wealthy. Nobody buys a Powerball ticket because the winning prize is a 1989 Mercury Sable.

And this lack of imagination is seen in all aspects of player development. Veterans are rarely traded, whether at the deadline or over the winter, even when their contracts are expiring; the Rockies seem to believe it’s safer to just have a name you know than step into the unfamiliar. Signings are seemingly made just because, not in service of any real coherent team plan. The Ian Desmond contract could have been defensible, but only if the team thought he could play shortstop. Instead, the master plan was to make him a first baseman, a condition under which there was zero reason to sign him at all. Similarly, the argument for inking Kris Bryant to a big contract assumes that you believe he’s your solution at third base now that you’ve lost Nolan Arenado. Instead, Bryant was ticketed for left field. Older minor leaguers having big seasons almost seems like it’s an annoyance to the Rockies, as if those players upending the apple cart by breaking into the lineup is a problem rather than a mercy.

I never thought Tom Murphy or Mike Tauchman or any number of other Triple-A guys were going to be stars, or even regulars. But why wouldn’t you want to find out what they can do when the other options are veterans going nowhere? Wynton Bernard was a terrific story, a player who had a huge season unexpectedly and still isn’t projected to be a plus. The Rockies did give him a call-up, but seemed to approach it as something nice to do for a minor league veteran rather than treating him as a player who could benefit them.

This lineup, much like other Rockies lineups of recent money, is just a bunch of guys thrown together for whatever reason. They could get a healthy Bryant and ZiPS is a real fan of Ezequiel Tovar’s future. But there’s so little upside in most of this lineup that there’s just no payoff if they hit their flush. It’s the baseball equivalent of an April Ludgate eye-roll. Good teams seize opportunities; the Rockies appear to think of those opportunities as headaches.

And while Tovar has continued his progress, Zac Veen’s struggles for Double-A Hartford really issued a firm body blow to his projections. There’s only so much damage you can do to a projection in about a month, but hitting .177/.262/.224 in 141 plate appearances was a brutal debut in the high minors. ZiPS is definitely a little worried about him in the short-term.

Pitchers

One of the paradoxes of recent Rockies teams is that they’ve actually proven decently effective at putting together a surprisingly competent rotation. Germán Márquez is the centerpiece. He had a tough 2022 season, but ZiPS still likes him enough to expect him to bounce back to something at least on the border between ace and number-two starter. The rest of the rotation broadly projects in the middle quintile of the league, and perhaps as importantly, they’re generally battle-proven in Coors. Except for more José Ureña and Ryan Feltner taking the mountain lion’s share of the innings Chad Kuhl covered in 2022, the rotation looks rather similar to last year’s. Assuming Antonio Senzatela is completely recovered from the knee problems that cut his 2022 season short, he, Feltner, Ureña, Kyle Freeland, and Austin Gomber fill out a boring but serviceable starter corps, with Gomber likely the swingman when everyone’s healthy. The team’s better pitching prospects are generally in the lower levels of the minors, so there won’t be a ton of pressure from below on the current staff.

The bullpen projects as generally inferior to the rotation, though a bullpen is arguably less important when you’re talking about a team trying to win 70 games rather than 95. Steamer is not at all psyched about Brent Suter, but ZiPS still holds out hope, and it also really likes Pierce Johnson and Dinelson Lamet in relief. Daniel Bard gets a pretty conservative projection here, but he’s also close enough to 40 that aging risk becomes a more meaningful factor for him than for most pitchers; there’s always that chance he drops off the cliff. I certainly hope that doesn’t happen soon, as his comeback has been one of the cooler stories in baseball the last few years.

Where ZiPS sees issues is the back of the ‘pen, and it’s not at all stoked about Riley Pint or Blair Calvo. Scott Oberg is mostly listed here for historical interest; his problems with blood clots have left his career in serious jeopardy, and unfortunately, there’s a good chance he doesn’t pitch again.

The Rockies have enough low-variance talent that their floor is probably higher than teams like the Reds, Pirates, or Nationals. But unlike some teams where you can squint and kind of see how they get to 85 wins, I’m just not able to do so here. I’d love to see a change in organizational direction from the top to the bottom — and it’s the top that’s the problem, not the day-to-day staffers. If the Rockies want to emulate the Rays’ success in a tough division, they’re going to have to actually understand why the Rays are good before they can make any real progress.

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 or have retired, players who will miss 2023 due to injury, and players who were released in 2022. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Death Dixieland Bubblegum Ska-Funk band, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.22, above 2022’s level of offense but lower than other years. Pitchers who appear to have a fairly definite change in the majors from start-to-relief or vice-versa from these projections will receive reconfigured updates in the spring.

Hitters are ranked by 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.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by flaws in the physical reality of the universe or by skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter.