A Few Quick Thoughts About the Rockies’ Offense

When Charlie Blackmon was double-switched out of Tuesday night’s NL Wild Card game in the bottom of the eighth inning, immediately after the Cubs tied the game and the Rockies put in Wade Davis, it wasn’t hard to miss just how limited Colorado’s offense is. With their season on the line, the next nine hitters that manager Bud Black sent to the plate from that point were as follows:

Valaika, pinch-hitting for Davis in the 10th, gave way to pitcher Seung Hwan Oh, who departed in the 11th in favor of Chris Rusin via a double-switch that removed Desmond and brought in McMahon. Scott Oberg followed Rusin in the 12th, double-switched out in a move where Wolters replaced Butera. That Wolters ultimately collected the game-winning hit in the 13th owes something to the position that Cubs starter-turned-reliever Kyle Hendricks was forced into under the circumstances, but the fact that he came through, despite the meager prospects for doing so, is both Very Baseball and why the Rockies lived to fight another series.

Still, it’s worth noting that the Rockies’ offensive deficit stands out on several different fronts. Yes, they ranked second in the NL in overall scoring (4.79 runs per game), but that papers over a huge home/road split of 5.49 runs per game at home and 4.13 per game on the road, the latter of which ranked ninth in the NL. Via wRC+, their overall offense is tied for the second-worst of the Wild Card era (1995 onward) with… last year’s edition of the team, which lost the Wild Card game to the D-backs:

Of course, those figures include plate appearances by players that won’t come anywhere near the postseason. Jeff Sullivan did take the trouble to crunch the numbers after omitting pitcher hitting and paring down to the expected rosters of the playoff teams. Via that exercise, the Rockies’ wRC+ rose to 102… which was still the worst in the field, and not by a little, as was their WAR:

That right-most column is the number of players on the team who posted at least a 100 wRC+ while getting 250 PA overall and are still with the team (Andrew McCutchen counts for the Yankees, Mike Moustakas and Curtis Granderson for the Brewers, etc). This is one reason why the outlook for the Rockies looked so dire as of September 18, when Story suffered a right elbow injury that was feared to be UCL-related.

The 250-PA threshold is admittedly arbitrary; for example, it misses AL Wild Card Game hero Luke Voit, the hottest hitter in the AL since the start of August, as well as the hottest of any player moved in the days leading up to the July 31 deadline. I chose the cutoff to give the benefit of the doubt to the Rockies with regards to Dahl, the oft-injured former prospect who missed all of 2017 (save for 82 minor league PA) due to a stress reaction in his rib cage, and then missed all of June and July of this season (save for a rehab assignment) due to a foul-ball induced fracture in his right foot.

Before going down with the fracture, Dahl hit a very lopsided .275/.309/.484 with four homers in 97 PA, walking just 4.1% of the time and striking out 28.9%. He started 20 games in either left field (in place of Parra, mostly) or right (in place of Gonzalez) and came off the bench another 12 times. It wasn’t a particularly effective performance, good for just a 95 wRC+, and it fit into the larger pattern of the Rockies’ ongoing failure to assemble a productive outfield, which I wrote about in July. Upon returning, he continued to share time in the corners, hitting a tepid .254/.338/.451 for a 90 wRC+ in August and then a torrid .287/.330/.655 for a 141 wRC+ in September/October. He hit nine of his 16 home runs in 94 PA in the latter “month” (including the NL West tiebreaker game), with six in a seven-game span from September 24-30, the must-win games the team played against the Phillies and Nationals. Mind you, they weren’t especially high-leverage homers; only two gave the team the lead, and most of their wins in that span were routs in which the Rockies scored at least 10 runs.

So is Dahl really another legitimate threat for Colorado? I was willing to believe so during that barrage of homers, but now that Team Entropy isn’t tugging at my sleeve and I’ve had a closer look at the numbers, I’m not so sure. Get a load of these home/road splits:

Now, any conclusions based upon sample sizes of 105 or 144 plate appearances should be taken with a grain of salt, but those wide splits don’t exactly bolster my conviction that he’s a major asset. Still, a platoon involving him and late-August addition Matt Holliday, who hit .283/.415/.434 in 65 PA while making 13 starts in left field and one at DH, does make for decent upgrade over Parra. Whether that will be enough to help the Rockies get past the Brewers in the Division Series will hinge upon much more, but as the series unfolds, all of this is worth keeping in mind.