ZiPS 2021 Projections: Colorado Rockies

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Colorado Rockies.

Batters

This is one of the worst teams in the majors — certainly the worst that seems blissfully unaware of that fact. The Rockies have two position players they can count on to be good, and one of them, Nolan Arenado, is no guarantee to start the 2021 season with Colorado. Even after a weak 60-game stretch in a year everyone would like to forget, if the Rockies do shop Arenado, they will get significant interest in the market. But would they actually close a deal? I’m not sure they will be realistic about the effect his contract and the unknown of an opt-out will have on trade offers. Regardless, ZiPS expects a bounceback season as he continues to make his mid-career Hall of Fame case.

If the Rockies do trade Arenado — and maybe even if they don’t — it would be hard for them to avoid trading Trevor Story if they actually do go for a full-on rebuild. Colorado has had poor fortune with some of its top offensive prospects, but Story has been one of the best kinds of surprises: a player who got far less press as a prospect than others in the organization (despite being a high draft pick) but kept hitting as he went up the ladder, got to the majors first and left the competition scrambling to find other positions. One of those players, Brendan Rodgers, is at risk of going the way of Ryan McMahon, in that he’s done everything he could in the minors to earn a chance in the majors only to find the team casually disinterested in distributing the necessary playing time.

The bright spots for Colorado end with Arenado and Story. There are few players on this roster who should be starting for a major league team; after more injuries and some ugly numbers when on the field in 2020, David Dahl may not actually be one of them. Josh Fuentes is currently listed as the first baseman on our depth charts, but I don’t expect him to end the offseason with that job. It’s possible that the Rockies stick with him at first, but his .306 batting average shouldn’t mask his .759 OPS at the position.

On the plus side, the Rockies got a good long look at promising youngster Matt Kemp, and Ian Desmond is coming off the best season of his Colorado career with an 86 wRC+ and -0.3 WAR.

Pitchers

Things are less bleak here, though likely nowhere near enough to compensate for the team’s all-encompassing malpractice in the lineup. Germán Márquez is just below the top tier of starting pitchers, but he’s survived Coors Field better than most. In a good season, he ought to make some noise at the back of Cy Young ballots; if I’d had an NL Cy Young vote in 2018, I’d have given him a spot on the ballot over Kyle Freeland. Signed through 2023 with an option for ’24, I think Márquez would actually fetch more on the market than either Arenado or Story, as weird as that might sound.

There were reasons to both be happy and worried about Freeland’s 2020. His line was closer to reasonable expectations than his dreadful 2019 season as — predictably — his home-run rate returned to relative normalcy. It’s not quite captured in a computer projection, but I like that he tinkered with his repertoire and focused on his curve and changeup quite a lot during the season. But on the negative side, losing a strikeout a game for two straight seasons is rarely an auspicious sign, so it keeps me in “hold” rather than “buy” territory.

As usual, the bullpen needs help. ZiPS likes Scott Oberg, Mychal Givens, and Carlos Estévez just fine, but there isn’t a great deal of upside, and the quality falls off after this trio. One exception is Daniel Bard, one of the majors’ best comeback stories and who hadn’t been both healthy and effective since 2011. He came back throwing 97 mph and struck out 27 batters in 24 1/3 innings for Colorado; his projection might in fact be low. In this case, though, I can’t really expect ZiPS to have a great feel for a player in this type of situation.

Matt Pierpont is an interesting minor league free agent as a pitcher ZiPS thought should be in Colorado’s bullpen for 2021, but like countless others before (Mike Tauchman, Tom Murphy, Roberto Ramos, etc), the Rockies never showed much interest in him despite his success in the minors. He didn’t make this list, but Alexander Guillen, signed by the Marlins, had a projection of similar quality.

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, players who will miss 2021 due to injury, and players who were released in 2020. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Finnish industrial death metal fourth-wave ska J-pop band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected 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 which 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. ZiPS is assuming that the designated hitter will continue in force in 2021; if it does not, there will be widespread minor adjustments across the board come April.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article, or get angry at Dan on Twitter or something.