Okay, But Seriously, What if the Rockies Made the Playoffs?
The Colorado Rockies are a bit of a laughingstock at the moment. I say this intending no undue disrespect; from a player evaluation and roster-building standpoint, they’re one of the handful of organizations in baseball that doesn’t meet the bare standard of competence. They’ve missed the playoffs five years running and lost 197 games over the past two seasons.
Unfortunately, this fallow period is the historical norm in Colorado. The Rockies strung together a pair of surprising playoff appearances in 2017 and 2018; apart from those two campaigns, which netted a total of one playoff win, the Rockies haven’t finished over .500 since 2010. In 31 seasons, they’ve never won the NL West.
And there isn’t really an end in sight. No Orioles-style bumper crop of prospects that can turn 100 losses to 100 wins in 18 months. Our playoff odds didn’t give the Rockies the dreaded goose egg, but it came down to the wire. The Rockies are projected to go 63-99, with a 0.1% chance of making the postseason. Both numbers are the worst in baseball. The projected 31-game gap to first place isn’t the largest in the league, if only because the Nationals are just as bad and the computers see the Braves as better than the Dodgers. (So do I, Ohtani and all, for what it’s worth.)
In spite of all this gloominess, I have great affection for the Rockies as a franchise. Their roster isn’t very good, but it’s heavy on players I like: Justin Lawrence, Kris Bryant, Brenton Doyle, and so on. The Rockies have great uniforms and a pretty ballpark, making them — in my estimation — a top-three aesthetic franchise in the sport. And I’m faintly obsessed with one of the franchise’s foundational millstones: How do you build a winning pitching staff in Denver’s thin air?
I don’t like that the Rockies are probably going to finish in last place, but on paper, they’re clearly the worst team in a highly competitive division.
We live in a golden age of people ignoring the laws of probability because the odds don’t line up with their worldview. This is largely to our detriment. But in this narrow case, that outlook could be useful.
When you don’t like what the numbers say, go get different numbers.
So I went to Dan Szymborski, the guy who makes numbers. Out of the entire FanGraphs family, Dan is the one who spends the most time getting yelled at on social media. And to be honest, he only deserves some of the abuse he takes.
See, the ZiPS projections that you see on our standings and player pages and so forth represent a 50th percentile projection. In reality, Dan boots up his Mike-from-The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress-style supercomputer and simulates millions of seasons. What you see is only the median outcome. By definition, some — even most — players and teams will either noticeably over- or underperform their median projection. But other projections are available.
Surely that ugly number didn’t represent the entire range of outcomes. So I asked Dan for something a bit more optimistic. He simulated the 2024 season five million times. (“Watching the 2024 Rockies play baseball for five million years sounds like one of the scarier depictions of punishment in the afterlife,” he said.) The 90th-percentile outcome for the Rockies was 79 wins. The 95th-percentile outcome was 82 wins.
I’ll be completely honest with you, that’s worse than I had feared. Not even once out of 20 simulations did the Rockies get to a record that would’ve made the playoffs last year. In 2023, 84 wins was the minimum buy-in for a playoff spot. Since 2017, only one team has won its division by winning fewer than 90 games in a 162-game season. Both the 84-win Diamondbacks last year and the 88-win Braves in 2021 won the pennant, so we’ll assume that just getting in is enough.
So let’s zoom out and see the whole distribution, which ranges from a minimum of 31 wins (be honest, you’d be interested in seeing this happen) to a maximum of 107:
So the Rockies have a 3.53% chance of winning at least 84 games, a 1.29% chance of winning 88, a 0.72% chance of winning 90, and a 0.01% chance of winning 100. Now we’re getting somewhere.
What would it look like if it actually happened?
Eight years ago — eight years ago this week, actually — I was faced with a situation similar to this while working at Baseball Prospectus. We were promoting that season’s PECOTA projections, and feeling arch and cheeky as ever, I decided to conjure a scenario in which the Phillies — whom PECOTA projected to win 65 games that year, lowest in baseball — could win 104 games and the division title.
In order to do that, I took the 90th-percentile projection for every player on the likely Opening Day roster, plus a couple big prospects, and totaled up the new stats. The likelihood of any one of those players having such success was one in 10. The likelihood of all 27 players on my list doing so was one in a number so incomprehensibly large I could not come up with a suitable illustration at the time.
I’ve found one since. Ten meters is roughly the height of a three-story building; 1027 meters is more than 100 billion light years, which is greater than the diameter of the observable universe.
But one chance in 1027 is not zero. So let’s roll with it and do the same thing with the Rockies’ 90th-percentile ZiPS projections, which Dan was once again gracious enough to provide me with. Actually 1038 this time, because I roped in a bigger base roster:
| Order | Pos. | Player | Bats | PA | 90% OPS+ | 90% WAR | 50% OPS+ | 50% WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DH | Charlie Blackmon | L | 539 | 127 | 1.9 | 96 | 0.3 |
| 2 | 1B | Kris Bryant | R | 560 | 138 | 2.2 | 108 | 0.6 |
| 3 | LF | Nolan Jones | L | 602 | 151 | 5.0 | 121 | 3.1 |
| 4 | 2B | Brendan Rodgers | R | 581 | 134 | 3.1 | 100 | 1.4 |
| 5 | 3B | Ryan McMahon | L | 588 | 125 | 4.3 | 93 | 2.3 |
| 6 | C | Elias Díaz | R | 371 | 117 | 1.6 | 86 | 0.0 |
| 7 | SS | Ezequiel Tovar | R | 630 | 117 | 4.3 | 87 | 2.2 |
| 8 | RF | Sean Bouchard | R | 392 | 138 | 2.2 | 106 | 0.9 |
| 9 | CF | Brenton Doyle | R | 539 | 98 | 2.5 | 71 | 0.9 |
| Role | Pos. | Player | Bats | PA | 90% OPS+ | 90% WAR | 50% OPS+ | 50% WAR |
| Bench | C | Jacob Stallings | R | 218 | 106 | 2.0 | 76 | 0.9 |
| Bench | 1B/3B | Elehuris Montero | R | 301 | 128 | 2.3 | 95 | 0.5 |
| Bench | INF | Alan Trejo | R | 168 | 115 | 1.9 | 83 | 0.5 |
| Bench | OF | Bradley Zimmer | L | 112 | 89 | 0.9 | 57 | -0.4 |
| Role | Pos. | Player | Bats | PA | 90% OPS+ | 90% WAR | 50% OPS+ | 50% WAR |
| Reserve | C | Drew Romo | S | 51 | 103 | 0.3 | 75 | -0.3 |
| Reserve | 1B/LF/RF | Hunter Goodman | R | 371 | 132 | 2.5 | 99 | 0.3 |
| Reserve | 1B/RF/LF | Michael Toglia | S | 105 | 104 | 1.0 | 76 | -0.8 |
Don’t worry too much about the WAR totals, since they’re dependent on playing time. For that, I used the projected plate appearances from the RosterResource depth charts.
What does this once-in-a-cosmology season look like? Well, some of it seems pretty attainable. Bryant and Charlie Blackmon turn back the clock. Brendan Rodgers gets healthy. Nolan Jones, who’s going to be really good even in this universe, turns into a monster. The Mecha-Rockies don’t even need Doyle to be a league-average hitter!
Let’s turn the page to the pitchers:
| Role | Player | THR | IP | 90th% ERA | 90th% WAR | 50th% ERA | 50th% WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SP1 | Kyle Freeland | L | 162 | 4.47 | 2.1 | 5.24 | 1.1 |
| SP2 | Cal Quantrill | R | 155 | 4.18 | 2.2 | 4.93 | 1.3 |
| SP3 | Austin Gomber | L | 151 | 4.46 | 1.8 | 5.32 | 0.9 |
| SP4 | Ryan Feltner | R | 115 | 4.23 | 1.7 | 5.15 | 0.9 |
| SP5 | Dakota Hudson | R | 134 | 4.39 | 2.0 | 5.12 | 1.1 |
| Role | Player | THR | IP | 90th% ERA | 90th% WAR | 50th% ERA | 50th% WAR |
| CL | Justin Lawrence | R | 66 | 3.38 | 1.5 | 4.54 | 0.5 |
| SU8 | Tyler Kinley | R | 64 | 3.72 | 0.7 | 5.06 | 0.1 |
| SU7 | Jake Bird | R | 63 | 3.84 | 1.2 | 4.75 | 0.4 |
| MID | Nick Mears | R | 62 | 3.97 | 0.5 | 5.03 | 0.1 |
| MID | Jalen Beeks | L | 60 | 3.99 | 1.3 | 5.07 | 0.5 |
| MID | Gavin Hollowell | R | 54 | 3.84 | 0.7 | 5.02 | 0.1 |
| MID | Ty Blach | L | 23 | 4.60 | 1.1 | 5.48 | 0.4 |
| LR | Anthony Molina | R | 44 | 4.35 | 2.0 | 5.09 | 1.2 |
| Status | Player | THR | IP | 90th% ERA | 90th% WAR | 50th% ERA | 50th% WAR |
| IL | Germán Márquez | R | 28 | 3.87 | 2.8 | 4.75 | 1.6 |
| IL | Daniel Bard | R | 57 | 3.99 | 0.6 | 5.44 | -0.1 |
| IL | Lucas Gilbreath | L | 48 | 4.24 | 0.9 | 5.40 | 0.2 |
| Role | Player | THR | IP | 90th% ERA | 90th% WAR | 50th% ERA | 50th% WAR |
| Reserve | Peter Lambert | R | 111 | 4.52 | 1.4 | 5.38 | 0.6 |
| Reserve | Noah Davis | R | 42 | 5.10 | 0.9 | 5.92 | 0.2 |
| Reserve | Victor Vodnik | R | 40 | 4.30 | 0.6 | 5.24 | 0.1 |
| Reserve | Riley Pint | R | 28 | 4.63 | 0.3 | 5.90 | -0.4 |
| Reserve | Evan Justice | L | 33 | 4.51 | 0.3 | 5.79 | -0.3 |
| Reserve | Matt Koch | R | 21 | 4.37 | 0.7 | 5.58 | 0.0 |
Even in the 90th-percentile world, not a single starter with an ERA under 4.00, nor a single reliever with an ERA under 3.30. I am bereft at the smallness of our dreams.
If literally everything goes right for the Rockies, and we end up in the far right tail of that win total graph, this is what it’ll look like. And unless they actually make it to that one-in-five million 107-win season, they’d probably need the Giants and Diamondbacks to underperform, and the five or six best players on the Dodgers to give up baseball and start a jam band.
But again, it could happen. Let’s ship Mookie Betts a pair of Birkenstocks and a guitar. Anything is possible.
Michael is a writer at FanGraphs. Previously, he was a staff writer at The Ringer and D1Baseball, and his work has appeared at Grantland, Baseball Prospectus, The Atlantic, ESPN.com, and various ill-remembered Phillies blogs. Follow him on Twitter, if you must, @MichaelBaumann.
This was a lot of fun, thanks. I especially liked the illustration of what 10^27 meant.
Full disclosure, I am NOT the computer from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
That’s exactly what the computer would say…
In my OOTP sim Michael Toglia became prime Barry Bonds. Anything is possible
So you’re saying there’s a chance…
J.P. from “Angels in the Outfield” (90s version): Hey, it could happen!
And I’m faintly obsessed with one of the franchise’s foundational millstones: How do you build a winning pitching staff in Denver’s thin air?
I am obsessed with the analytical challenge of the Rockies too – but it is not imo your question. The analytical challenge I see is – how do you even statistically analyze a team that is a two standard deviation outlier – on EVERYTHING. And if you dig down, it is an outlier for real reasons not just random variation or perpetual suckitude. In an MLB universe, 2σ is ONE team and there is no such thing as a one-team universe in ‘normal’ stats.
I would rephrase your question. It is actually rather easy to build a winning pitching staff in Denver’s thin air if you define ‘winning’ in a way that matters. Defined as W-L%, the home-field Rockies have a winning % in 11 of the 16 years since their World Series appearance – 2011, 2012, 2015, 2020, and 2023 were below .500.
So what is the pitching challenge for a team that plays 50% of their games at Coors?
One is a career motivation challenge. How do you recruit/develop/motivate a pitcher with that schedule – when there is zero possibility that pitcher can EVER win a Cy Young award. If Ubaldo couldn’t win it in 2010 – and I never even heard someone make that case – then it won’t happen. Winning that sort of individual hardware is not in the Rockies control or the pitchers control. The Rockies will always be Rodney Dangerfield.
The other Rockies challenge for Coors pitching is how do you fill ONE pitching staff with the combo of 50% ‘normal’ schedule and 50% 2σ on-the-moon outlier schedule? I’ve got my ideas that are stale now but I haven’t even seen any other real ideas much less experiments. I’m not even sure the Rockies much care about achieving a ‘winning percentage’ on the road which is what will be necessary for any postseason achievements.
Agree with this. The Rockies’ “millstone” really should be an advantage. It’s a little like when NL teams had to add a DH for interleague games. The AL teams had a built-in advantage during those AL-hosted games because they constructed rosters that were designed to use a DH for the majority of their games, whereas NL teams needed the DH only for a handful of games. The Rockies could focus on fireballers rather than spin rate, stress OF speed and IF mashers, and take other steps to amplify their home-field advantage. It would be interesting to see what the Rays brass would come up with if they packed up and moved to Denver. .
The two biggest problems I see with that are:
the Rockies truly are a 2σ outlier and the nature of the way they are outliers means that pressing a home field advantage will hinder the road game. idk if vice-versa but i doubt improving the road game will make the Rockies a more valuable/profitable franchise.
The Rockies appear to be the most insular organization I have ever seen. Who knows what the decision process is from the inside but there has never been an outside hire and I’m not aware there has been an outside search. So whether it is a hire from an external organization or an out-of-the-box approach, it doesn’t seem possible.
If a team played all of their games on the surface of the moon, you would expect them to have an almost 1.000 record at home. The magnitude of how much their home stadium is an outlier should help… then as for playing games on the road, even the A’s won 30% of those last year.
The Rockies only won 27% of games on the road last year. While that is worse than most years, the cumulative average of road records in seasons where the Rockies don’t make the postseason is 35.7%. When they make the postseason, the road record is 51.6%.
At home, the W-L% in non-postseason years is 51.6% – in postseason years its 59.2%.
Meaning – it’s the road record not the home record that mainly drives post-season opportunities for the Rockies. And if you look under the hood – that is the 2σ outlier stuff that only the Rockies have to deal with and that no one else even comprehends – the habits and skill sets that involve leaving ‘home’ (moon) and going on the ‘road’ (normal). The more habituated to home, the more difficult the transition to road.
Analytically, it’s the best challenge in MLB. But sabermetrics uses ‘normal distribution’ assumptions which suck for outliers and suck double hard when a particular team is outliers for everything everywhere all the time.
Except that when the AL teams played each other there was no disadvantage to their roster construction. When the Amplified HFA Rockies play on the road they’d have a big disadvantage. The challenge is how to win enough in both situations.
The Rays’ approach of cycling through fireballers with half the staff on TJS leave could work.
A lineup of Pedro Serranos on the IF and Willie Mays Hayes’s in the OF would be fun.
What a fun idea … move the Rays FO to Denver and see what they do.
Along these same lines, I’ve always thought teams should do more to make their playing field dimensions/stadiums unique to try and build an advantage for all home games by being able to uniquely build their roster to optimize for it. For example you could do a really short porch in LF and long line with a wall in RF (acquire righty pull hitters and lefty opp hitters), insanely deep center (glove first CF), huge foul ground territory (pitch to contact fly ball pitchers), maybe even get extreme with length of infield grass if mlb lets you get away with it (not sure on this actually)
I like this idea..Try to go 57-24 at home & hope that you’re decent enough on the road to win 85 games.
This would work even better if the type of players needed were different than what most other teams preferred, I.E. Colorado could take advantage of a marketplace inefficiency.
Is it really the altitude or is is awful player drafting/development? I feel like the Rockies’ pitcher drafting strategy changes every 3-4 years. Has it ever just been, “draft the best pitcher”?? I mean, how many former Rockies pitchers went on to success elsewhere after leaving the team? I honestly can’t think of one.
It’s the effect of altitude. The strategy of ‘draft the best pitcher’ may well work for 29 other teams and for 50% of the least valuable Rockies games (on the road). That doesn’t work at Coors because all pitching outcomes at Coors tend towards mediocre with big occasional blowups. That is what it is and always will be what it is.
There can be huge years for pitchers at Coors – 2010 Ubaldo, 2013 JDLR, 2018 Freeland, etc. But in all those cases, the team itself has basically decided – there’s no repeatable skill set for Coors. No reason to lock this pitcher up for the only team in baseball that NEEDS pitchers who work well at Coors. No ability to maximize their innings FOR Coors.
For the much larger universe of pitchers who fear Coors. Which include an even higher % of ‘the best pitchers’. The ones who dream of a Cy Young or no-hit games or DOMINANCE or somesuch. The pitchers who will crumble at Coors when at some possible point in the future they will face the Rockies at Coors. The Rockies don’t seem to recognize this quickly. To prepare them for trade and maximize that value by maximizing their innings away from Coors. Instead the Rockies break them and then let them go.
As you yourself say. There don’t seem to be any pitchers who work well at Coors and then work well away from Coors. It’s true. That’s not a drafting/development problem. It’s just a recognition that it’s not the same pitcher who can thrive at both. It’s different pitchers who can thrive at one or the other but not both – or at least not for long.
Purple Row tip of the cap to ya, hope you’re well.
Thanks. You too. Been awhile since I dropped by there.
No matter how the Rockies season goes, I’m sure that Dinger the Dinosaur will have another 90th percentile season again this year.
I got a picture with him at a game against the Mets last season. Highlight of that entire month.
To be fair here, the difference from actual playing performance vs projection might have correlation across players from a team. If a team has a better model than ZiPS for projecting players, then on average, all of the players’ performances are likelier to be above the 50th percentile of ZiPS than a randomly chosen player in ZiPS. The probability the Rockies are one of these teams though seems small…maybe not 10^-27 small, but small nonetheless
If you actually DID ship Mookie Betts a pair of Birkenstocks and a guitar, his odds of headlining Coachella would be roughly the same as the Rockies’ odds of making the playoffs.
If you gave him 6 months to practice I’d give him a higher chance. Mookie Betts is good at everything, I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime around month four he starts cranking out singer-songwriter hits.
Truth be told, my comment was probably more about Mookie than the Rockies. I’m not surprised you took the over on him.
We need Dan’s AI app to create a simulation of Mookie’s debut single.
Yes PLEASE.
And the chance of both is one in five million squared
Fact. Mookie Betts has a better chance of being the next Dickie Betts than Rockies bets have a bettor’s chance of paying out. Or something like that.
I don’t really think this is the right team to do this with because projecting the Rockies is so hard to begin with. Projection systems have been too low on the Rockies for years because of it (although still closer than what the Rockies’ ownership proclaims the goals to be).
I’d rather see this with the A’s, who are phenomenally bad without the interesting issues of “playing in a weird place.”
Like, I look at this and the least plausble parts here are (1) Kris Bryant getting 560 PAs, (2) Brendan Rodgers’ hitting. Everything else I’m like “okay, that’s not so weird.” Because of Coors, someone gets a little lucky and the consequences are so much greater.
WHOA. The Rockies owe $131MM to an oft-injured 32 year-old now 1B whose 90th percentile projection is 2.2 WAR? Holy sh…
Bryant has one of the worst trade values in MLB right now. Obviously.
However, I think ZiPS is too harsh on Bryant when it comes to 90% projection.
37 year old Blackmon recording 1.9 WAR would be shocking given that the last time he did it was six years ago as a 31 year old.
32 year old Bryant recording 2.2 WAR would be more in the realm of pleasantly surprising given that he had a 3 WAR season as recently as 2021.
I think it’s the stupidest contract ever signed by an MLB team, even judging only from the time-of-signing perspective.
just wait until they give $200m to Pete Alonso in 9 months
So you’re saying there’s a chance!
Would you be able to share Nolan Jones 90th percentile statistics? How many HR/RBI/R and how high of a BA are we talking?
I vividly remember the 2003 Detroit Tigers winning 5 of their last 6 to go 49-119 and celebrating on the field. I can only imagine how a team trying to not lose it’s 130th game of the year would behave.
the expansion Washington Capitals lost their first 37 road games. When they achieved their first (and only) road win of the season, they passed around a trash can in the locker room in celebration, emulating how a team would pass around the Stanley Cup.
There’s a 2017 Houston Astros joke in here somewhere..
wait that’s an amazing story. Expansion teams are brutal yet awesome bc of stuff like this
So long as you aren’t discounting the Braves for playing 161 games, two teams have won their division with fewer than 90 wins. That 88-win team won the East, NL, and the WS.
? there have been plenty of sub 90 div winners
Since 2017, there have been two (not counting ‘20 of course). In the article it said there had been one.
If the 95th percentile outcome is 82 wins it seems pretty remarkable that ZIPS sees the absolute best possible outcome as 107 wins. That team described above as a probable playoff team seems impossibly optimistic and also not nearly good enough for 107 wins. What happened in the 107 win season?
That lineup above is pretty insane & deep though. No 8+ WAR guys (Says alot about Colorado that evne with all of the 90th percentile predictions they have 1 guy at 5 WAR & it’s exactly 5.0 WAR), but, out of the top 13 in PA’s, 12 are above 110 OPS+. That would be a crazy offense..but, I tend to agree the pitching would hold them back from 107 wins..more like a mid 90’s win team or something.
What I’d like to see is what is the absolute best outcome for the Braves or Dodgers? 125 wins? 130?
Would be like when you go into OOTP & edit a bunch of guys to be to have crazy stats in all categories & then sim the season with injuries turned off & go 155-7?
Technically, the best possible outcome is that the Rockies have a 162-0 season. The likelihood of that is 1 out 10^66. Yes, a 1 with 66 zeros after it.
This probability is roughly equivalent to locating 1 atom out of all the atoms that make up all the stars and planets in the Milky Way galaxy. (Actually, that value is 1 out of 10^67, but I couldn’t think of another analogy.)
Hey that extra zero is a huge amount!
What I would like to know is if any team in the past, if you had run similar projections based on the knowledge that would have been available prior to those seasons, would have had a curve that looks like the Rockies that actually achieved a 95+ win result. I mean, if there’s a 3% chance of it happening, and we have had so many baseball seasons happen already, you’d think somewhere along the line some team may have done this, or come close to it?
When it comes to the Rockies, their organizational plan is to pray for a miracle. Given the challenging environment, they really need to bring in some outsiders to reevaluate the org from top to bottom and triple the size of their analytics team while forbidding them to do laundry. It blows my mind that they can’t seem to develop a first baseman or left fielder. Then you get weird roster decisions like signing a shortstop to play first base (Desmond) or letting Jon Gray, who wanted to stay, walk, or stirring things up with Arenado until you have to dump him, then signing Bryant. The challenges of Coors are one thing, but the front office which is still virtually the same it was a decade ago, doesn’t make the odds any easier.
The thing is, winning doesn’t matter to the Rockies. They will draw average or better attendance again this year just like they do every year, which is apparently all Dick Monfort cares about, even if it takes Bill Schmidt $100 million more of his money to achieve the exact same result both winning- and attendance-wise as filling the roster with random AAA players and bench players would.
Now I want to see a projection of the 2024 Dodgers with 90th percentile outcomes for every player…
Please no. That’s like asking to see Jeff Bezos bank account for fun. Why would that be fun?
I really love this kind of article…
Wonder what the odds are of 4 or 5 of their best players hitting their 95th percentile projections, and if that, combined with the rest of the roster being around 50th percentile, would get them to the playoffs…
Probably not. They are the Rockies.
When I look for a Michael Baumann article, this, my friends, is exactly the kind of premise I’m looking for.
I have always felt the Rockies should have home and away squads. Obviously some guys would be on both. Maybe you could make 10 guys go on the Dl and call up “minor leaguers” for long road trips.