| Travis Heath. 31st August, 2005 - 5:16 pm
 The Colorado Rockies play in the worst division in baseball. In fact, this year’s version of the N.L. West may be the worst division in the history of baseball. There is a strong possibility that the team who wins the division will finish at or below .500. This would be the first time that such a thing has ever happened in the history of Major League Baseball.
You will hear the N.L. West division leading Padres fans in Southern California proclaiming that they will be a real threat to the St. Louis Cardinals in the first round of the playoffs. Yeah right. As my friend Wayne Campbell said in the early 90’s -- yeah and monkeys might fly out of my . . . well you know how it goes.
The Rockies were 27 games under .500 entering play Tuesday night. They were also just 12 ½ games out of first place. Had they played even .400 baseball for the first couple of months of the season they would be in contention to win the division. Folks, this is futility of epic proportions.
The Rockies were nothing more then a mediocre team for the past four or five seasons -- which of course was substantially better then they are now. As a result, they decided to blow the whole thing up (save Todd Helton), and start over with the farm system put in place during general manager Dan O’Dowd’s tenure.
With the youth movement moving full speed ahead, nearly everyone expected this to be a tough year for the young club, and it most certainly has been.
Although of late, the team has started playing much better baseball. The Rockies have won four consecutive road series -- including two road series against the division rival Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres -- for the first time in the history of the franchise. The few remaining die hard Rockies fans will tell you that this is a sign of things to come in the future, and that this success will catapult the team into the 2006 campaign.
I, on the other hand, see this as nothing more than really bad timing on the Rockies part. Not that they did this on purpose, but the Rockies always seem to find a way to screw things up -- even if it’s by accident. The team went to a youth movement one year too soon. Of course, no one could have predicted how horrendous the N.L. West would be this year. So, it was really nothing more than bad luck. Bad luck or not, our old friend named hindsight has informed us that the Rockies should have held onto their old stand by’s for at least one more season.
That’s right, the team should have kept players like Vinny Castilla, Larry Walker, Royce Clayton, Jeromy Burnitz, and Shawn Estes. And by not doing so, the organization cost themselves a chance to win the division.
I’m not saying that any of the aforementioned players are anything more then decent at this stage of their career. But that’s the whole point -- decent players very well may have been good enough to put the Rockies into the playoffs.
If that had happened, the team would have won back many fans. Denver is a phenomenal professional sports town, and they always seem to respond to any team that even resembles a winner. Do you think the city really would have cared that the Rockies were competing for a division title in the worst division in baseball? Yeah, probably just about as much as they cared that the Denver Broncos won the Superbowl as a wild card in 1998.
Look, I agree that the Rockies probably made the right move in the long term by rebuilding the team with homegrown talent (although I’m still skeptical of the overall competence of the front office as it is currently constructed). But, couldn’t they just have waited one more year to start the process?
Nah, because if they did, then they just wouldn’t be the Colorado Rockies. |
