The Rockies’ Offense Is Off to a Horrid Start

To no one’s surprise, the Rockies are bad: At 5–12, they own the worst record in baseball. Take a look back at the preseason standings and you’ll see that was the expectation all along: Colorado was projected to finish at roughly 65–97, sharing the title of worst team in the majors with Baltimore.

Those paths have diverged, slightly, about 10% of the way through the season. The Orioles, at 8–9, have been playing decently, relative to their bottom-dwelling expectations. You shouldn’t expect that to last, as their .421 projected full-season winning percentage is still the third-worst in the majors. But at least it’s been somewhat of a fun start for Baltimore.

Colorado, meanwhile, has sunk right to the bottom, almost like something you’d see in an elementary school science class when a teacher is attempting to explain density. “Do we think this will float?” they might ask the classroom. The Rockies are the baseball version of a resounding “no;” they did not manage to float, not even for just a few games.

The Rockies’ race to the basement has been in large part thanks to their poor offense. Through Tuesday’s games, Colorado hitters were slashing .222/.275/.394 in 603 plate appearances. If that sounds bad, that’s because it is. Without adjusting for Coors Field, the Rockies have the fourth-worst offense in the sport: Their team-wide .288 wOBA ranks 27th in baseball, and that includes the 11 games they’ve played in Denver. When factoring in their hitter-friendly home, the Rockies’ 66 wRC+ is 15 points behind the second-worst team (the Cubs at 81).

Unsurprisingly, this is shaping up to be one of the worst months for Rockies hitters in a long time. Using our advanced splits leaderboards, which go back to 2002, they have only once posted a single-month wOBA worse than their current .288 mark: July 2013, when they had a team-wide wOBA of .286. By wRC+, this 2021 start fares slightly better, with “just” the fourth-worst month on record, but it still finds itself among a group of some ugly months of offense:

Perhaps the most ridiculous thing about this Rockies’ start is how infrequently they have gotten on base. Again, even with 65% of their games coming at Coors Field so far, Colorado hitters are running a .275 OBP. That’s nearly 20 (!) points behind their second-lowest figure, when they posted a .293 OBP in three separate months, all included in the above table. How bad is a .275 OBP? In 2019, our most recent full season, not a single hitter who qualified for the batting title had an OBP that low. Randal Grichuk came the closest, putting up a .280 mark in 628 plate appearances.

Looking at all team months since 2010, the Rockies’ bad start with the bats “only” ranks 31st-worst out of 1,920. But it should be noted that, among March/Aprils, Colorado’s start is ninth-worst out of 330. Here’s the top-10 worst starts to a season since 2010, excluding 2020, when we did not have baseball in April:

Those are some pretty awful slash lines; none are worse than those 2017 Royals, who managed to hit just .210/.270/.336 in more than 800 plate appearances that April. That team actually had three qualified hitters at or above a 100 wRC+ for the month: Lorenzo Cain (104), Mike Moustakas (121), and Salvador Perez (114). But their other six hitters who received at least 40 plate appearances all posted sub-60 marks, including Adalberto Mondesi, who had a -14 wRC+ in 46 PA, and Paulo Orlando, who had a -17 wRC+ in 50 PA.

That Royals team did experience positive regression the rest of the way and finished with a 91 wRC+ for the season, good for 23rd in baseball, which raises a fascinating question: How much does team-wide offense change over a full season? Unlike individual players, teams alter their lineup, make acquisitions, and face injuries that force them to use different personnel. The lineup on Opening Day rarely looks like the lineup in Game 162. But bad teams typically remain bad; it’s not like those 2017 Royals became the best offensive team in baseball.

Thus, to consider how a poor start may be overcome, I scraped all team-Aprils from 2010 to ’19 and plotted them against each team’s full-season offensive numbers. There’s clearly a relationship between the two variables, but for many of the reasons I described, it’s not a perfect correlation. The 2017 Royals actually had a fairly large residual: They improved their wRC+ by seven points above their regressed expectation, ranking 49th out of the 300 team-seasons here:

Similar to the Royals, the Rockies have quite a few hitters who are underperforming their career averages to this point and should expect natural regression over the course of 162. While it is a little ridiculous to think that only one of the team’s seven hitters with 40 plate appearances has a wRC+ of at least 100, that also means that the rest of the team should eventually find its stroke.

As you would imagine based on their team-wide numbers, the Rockies have received worse-than-expected performances from most of their regulars, none worse than Fuentes and his .164/.164/.291 line. Not only is he falling short of his projected wRC+ by the widest margin, but he’s also doing this as the replacement to Nolan Arenado, whose career 118 wRC+ is sorely missed. Though it was fully their decision to trade Arenado to the Cardinals, in what Ben Clemens called an “unmitigated disaster” for Colorado, replacing him with a projected 67 wRC+ bat who has only produced a 7 wRC+ so far has not helped the situation.

Then there are players like Story and Blackmon, two mainstays in the Rockies’ lineup who have just gotten off to cold starts. Cron, too, could mash in the thin air, with our Depth Charts’ projections being the most bullish on his home run total at 31. It took him until Tuesday, though, to hit homer No. 1, which bumped his line to a meager .208/.321/.354.

None of this is to say that Colorado’s offense is going to be particularly good this year; it assuredly won’t be. The model shown above regresses this awful start to a full-season wRC+ of just 86, and the situation could get worse as the season marches on; given that Story is a free agent this winter and is unlikely to sign an extension, a trade feels inevitable. It’s going to be a long year for the Rockies, even in spite of the fact that they’ve been afforded the most hitter-friendly ballpark in the majors.