WASHINGTON – There are no silver linings to nine wins and 50 losses.
When you’re set to obliterate the record for most losses in a major league season – a record not even a year old – there’s nowhere to hide. When your manager gets fired, and the industry is mocking your organization, and there are no reinforcements coming to save you, 9-50 feels like a permanent condition.
Yet when you are the Colorado Rockies, and Major League Baseball dictates that you play 162 games, there is no choice but to continue showing up, if only to prove that 9-50 will not define you, and that whatever number the game assigns you at year’s end will not go in the game’s permanent records.
“I mean, that’s life. Life’s gonna hit you in the face a lot,” muses Warren Schaeffer, the Rockies’ 40-year-old interim manager elevated from third base coach and organizational lifer to replace the fired Bud Black on May 11, when the club was 7-33.
“You got to keep waking up and getting after it and really, there’s no way around it. You got to go straight through it.”
Yes, the Rockies are going through it.
It’s not yet summer, and the Rockies have already endured four eight-game losing streaks. The last of those skids dropped them to 9-50, which would be a 25-137 pace, which would make the 2024 Chicago White Sox’s record-setting 121 losses a year ago look like prosperity.
Yet, something happened after the Rockies took their expected sweep to the Mets in New York. They moved on to Miami and beat the Marlins to reach double-digit wins – on June 2.
Then, they beat the Marlins two more times, finished off the sweep and snapped their major league record streak of not winning a series at 22, 9-50 suddenly becoming 12-50.
At this point in the movie, you expect the music to swell and the montage to kick in, visions of decisive home runs and high fives dominating the screen. This is not that movie.
These are the 2025 Rockies, and they lost seven of their next eight games.
Once again, though, a mini-stand followed, as they avoided a sweep in Atlanta and took the first three of four games at Washington, scoring 10 runs twice in three games.
No, an 8-7 stretch in a year of almost runaway futility – Colorado is now 17-57 – isn’t necessarily a harbinger of anything. Yet for the Rockies, a mélange of promising but unpolished young players, third-chance veterans and platoon or bench players pressed into greater duty, it feels like progress.
“You don’t really have a choice. In life, not just baseball, you get tossed in some tough situations,” says Rockies outfielder Mickey Moniak, a former No. 1 overall pick now hoping to stick in his third organization.
“The season hasn’t gone the way we wanted to. But we play 162 games. If the first 60 or so weren’t how we wanted, we have a group in this clubhouse and a group of coaches who aren’t going to fold, and we’re gonna learn.
“We’re gonna grow.”
A star is born?
Funny thing about squads flirting with historic futility: The players bear almost all the public shame yet have only so much to do with the outcome.
These Rockies are a poorly put together team, ranking 30th in defensive runs saved (-41) and in the red in almost every key defensive metric. Three semi-regulars – Moniak, infielder Orlando Arcia and utilityman Tyler Freeman – were acquired between March 22 and May 28, reflecting the ad hoc nature of Rockies roster-building.
Amid the rubble of the early season, a star seemed to emerge.
Hunter Goodman, a fourth-round pick in 2021, leads major league catchers with 77 hits and NL catchers with 14 home runs, 11 of them away from Coors Field. He would be more than a perfunctory All-Star to ensure the Rockies are represented.
He’s proven so valuable to Colorado that Schaeffer has to closely monitor his usage, as Goodman has already caught more games – 47 – than he has in any pro season.
Goodman toggled between first, catcher and corner outfield in his first three pro seasons and appreciates being able to settle behind the dish. This season will be remembered as the one Goodman not only stuck in Denver but became a fixture.
Moniak saw it coming this spring when, before the Los Angeles Angels released him, when he watched from the opposing dugout while Goodman launched moonshots in the desert.
“Goody’s put together a helluva season,” says Moniak. “And I think the world is seeing that.”
Goodman was on the Albuquerque-Coors Field shuttle the past two seasons and has seen plenty of players come and go. He believes he’ll have permanent company soon.
“Seeing young guys come up, there’s going to be struggles, but watching guys learn and learn as we go through it and try to figure things out together and try and lean on each other has been really good,” says Goodman.
“Once you learn that every day is a new day, once you can figure out that routine of getting over the last game, and moving on to the next day, that helps a lot.”
It is perhaps the key to both team and individual survival. Michael Toglia, the 6-5, 225-pound first baseman, debuted in 2022 and mashed 25 home runs in 116 games last season, stoking expectations.
Yet he struck out a stunning 81 times in his first 54 games, a 39% strikeout rate. On May 31, with the Rockies at 9-49, the 26-year-old was optioned to Class AAA.
He missed the Rockies’ brief hot streak but was recalled June 16 – and now has three home runs in their past two games, both victories.
So, what changed when the Rockies played .153 ball through 59 games, and .533 ball in the past 15?
“I think before this month, there was a lot of hopeful baseball – kind of hoping things would go our way, playing not to lose,” says Toglia, 26. “Now I feel like everybody has the confidence that we can be a winning team here.”
Moniak agrees.
“We could’ve let the start of the season weigh on us and bring us down. I don’t think we’ve done that,” he says. “I think we’ve grown as a team. I think we’re starting to show up to the field and expect to win the game instead of try not to lose.”
‘We want to be better than that’
Chase Dollander admits he was emotional on April 6, when he made his major league debut in front of his family, his girlfriend and other supporting figures, less than two years after he was drafted ninth overall out of Tennessee.
On the other hand, it is nothing he never expected.
That’s the mentality of a pitcher who anticipates stardom, or at least a very long major league career. It is what the Rockies would like him to become – a rare Coors Field pitching success.
Dollander certainly has seen it already.
“I’ve been prepared for everything,” says Dollander. “I’ve envisioned everything. I do a lot of visualization stuff – envisioning not just the good but also the bad and how I’m going to prepare for that.
“You’re going to face adversity at some point in time and this year, I’ve faced a good bit of it. Things don’t fall your way and you just have to keep on going, keep on working and eventually it will start to land.”
Making your major league debut amid a season where your team lost 50 of its first 59 is, shall we say, suboptimal. And Dollander’s results have been uneven: He’s pitched to a 6.57 ERA and 1.54 WHIP in 11 starts, failing to reach the fourth inning in three of them.
Yet he does not shirk from what is expected, which is to succeed where myriad prospects and free agents have failed: Be an ace at Coors Field.
“You’re going to give up more homers,” he says. “ You’re going to give up more bloop hits. The hits that really make you mad are the ones that are less than 80 mph and they fall for a hit. The field’s so big, that’s just going to happen.
“And then on top of that, your stuff’s not going to move as much. So it’s how can you limit damage when those things happen.
“Because inevitably, that’s going to happen.”
Dollander says this not in a woe-is-me tone but rather with a heavy dose of pragmatism, knowing that his goal is not necessarily to win ERA titles. Rather, it’s to simply give the Rockies a rotation rock, whatever form that takes.
“No matter what the team’s record is, no matter what my record is or my stats are, staying in the moment is the big thing,” says Dollander. “When I put my best version of myself on the mound, I’m giving my team all I have. And I hope they know that.
“Every time I go out there, for me, it’s a war. It’s either life or death. And I go out there with that mentality. I’m putting it all on the line.”
With a six-pitch mix that includes a fastball and sinker that both clock in at 96.5 mph, he may be well-suited to do just that at Coors.
“Every start he gets a little better and starts to figure things out a little more,” says Goodman. “Over the course of this year into next year, it’s going to be huge for him to keep getting his feet wet and learning.”
Moniak says the Rockies would be “doing ourselves a disservice” if they failed to grasp lessons forged in the misery of perpetual losing. This season will certainly be one to grow on, even if their stiffest competition may come from ghosts.
The Rockies entered the week tied with the 1932 Red Sox for the worst start through 72 games. They’ve since moved past them and heck, if they split the next 10 games, their winning percentage will climb over the ’24 White Sox.
Avoiding ignominy is in their grasp. But the Rockies want something more from this lost season that’s somehow not as dark as it once was.
“It’s a great opportunity,” says Schaefer, “for young guys and veterans alike to feel that it is not a good feeling to lose, and it’s not acceptable to lose over the long haul, and that we want to be better than that.
“I mean, everybody’s in this together, you know, it’s not young and old, it’s. It’s the Rockies.”