2024 ZiPS Projections: Colorado Rockies

For the 20th 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

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: the Colorado Rockies will almost certainly be one of the worst teams in baseball in 2024, a prime candidate to get the top pick in next year’s draft lottery. There’s just no way around that conclusion, as the Rockies don’t have the same young depth or big league-quality role players that the Baltimore Orioles had on hand to make their initial burst in 2022 possible.

Still, the team has at least shown signs of life in their decision-making processes over the year or so. Gone — as far as I’m aware — is the ownership talk of winning 94 games. And young players are seeing the field. There were times Ezequiel Tovar struggled mightily at the plate during his rookie season, especially in the first month, but for once, the team avoided panicking and blocking a top prospect with the Chris Owings/José Iglesias-type veterans who hang around Triple-A looking for a big league job. And while it took the franchise a month to get him onto the roster, the Rockies looked for excuses to play Nolan Jones rather than searching for reasons not to. That paid off, with Jones enjoying an excellent rookie season that saw him improve more in the outfield than most expected. A lot of Colorado’s marginal prospects in their 20s struggled, but at least they played. None of Elehuris Montero, Alan Trejo, or Michael Toglia did all that well, but their playing time demonstrated a (possible) change in organizational thinking, as players like them have been marginalized in the past. Think back to Tom Murphy or Mike Tauchman during their time with the Rockies — the team could not have seemed less interested in seeing what they had.

Brenton Doyle rightly won a Gold Glove award, and the defense is probably mostly real; the ZiPS probability-based method for minor league performance had him at 11 runs better than average in 2022 despite this method being intentionally conservative because of its uncertainty. (For those curious, the highest-ranked outfielders in 2023 were Jorge Barrosa and Ceddanne Rafaela.) Doyle’s bat leaves much to be desired, but there’s a real argument to be made that given the size of the Coors outfield, this is a spot where the team should be willing to swap offense for defense.

ZiPS doesn’t expect Jones to regress too much in 2024 — the Sophomore Slump is a myth, but regression toward the mean is not — and projects considerable growth from Tovar, who was extremely young in his debut. ZiPS also expects a typical season from Ryan McMahon, and while it appears that Brendan Rodgers no longer has star upside, he’s a roughly league-average player when healthy.

That isn’t to say that this team has completely avoided mistakes. The Rockies actually made some trades near the deadline, which they almost never did in the past, but if they were ever going to get anything for Elias Díaz, it would have been last July. Coco Montes deserved a longer look, and I think he’d be an interesting pickup for someone (though he did pass through waivers in September).

As for the rest of the lineup… well, things don’t look great. At this point, neither Kris Bryant nor Charlie Blackmon project particularly well. This team is going to have one of the worst offenses in baseball again, and any long-term turnaround is going to require greater creativity than simply waiting for Zac Veen and Drew Romo, both of whom had disappointing 2023 seasons for a variety of reasons, to come and save the day.

Pitchers

Losing Germán Márquez and Antonio Senzatela to Tommy John makes this group look even worse than it is, but let’s be honest: their arm trouble isn’t what’s keeping the Rockies from being playoff relevant in 2024. Márquez seems the more likely to appear towards the end of the season, having had his procedure a couple months earlier than Senzatela in 2023. Of the pickups the team has made to eat some innings, Dakota Hudson is a groundball pitcher in front of what should be a solidly above-average infield defense, while Cal Quantrill typically isn’t crushable when he struggles. Along with Austin Gomber and Ryan Feltner, they’re basically here so that the games will end and the bullpen doesn’t have to throw 1,100 innings.

As for the bullpen… yeah. ZiPS likes Justin Lawrence, Jake Bird, and Jalen Beeks to be around average, with the rest of the relief corps — including any possible interesting minor leaguers — set to be off that standard. But again, like the Orioles from 2019-2021, the 2024 record isn’t the point. Instead of paying too much for relievers who were good two or three years ago, the Rockies should try to accumulate any halfway interesting young thrower under 25, even if they don’t have a clue, and see who has an epiphany. This is a method only lousy teams have the luxury to adopt.

Right now, ZiPS has Colorado in the 64-68 win range, depending on the assumptions you make about who will play, where, and when. The problem with the Rockies hasn’t just been that they’ve been a bad team, but that they’ve been a bad team with no idea of how bad teams become good ones. Being a bad team with a vision would be a tremendous upgrade over the club that frittered away the prime years of some good young talent during the disastrous Jeff Bridich era. And I’m not one who tends toward optimism with this franchise!

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time.

Here are how the ZiPS percentiles worked out in 2023 for pitchers and hitters in in 2023. Percentiles are based on the projected PA or TBF.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2024 due to injury, and players who were released in 2023. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Belgian Death Metal Skiffle Band that only plays songs by Franz Schubert, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.33.

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 the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter.