It can be hard to tell when it is safe to officially declare a bad baseball team a historically bad one. You usually kind of know it when you see it, but passing certain mile markers allows you to affirmatively point the finger and declare: These men belong in the pisspot of history.
One such signpost arrives when words like "worst" and "since" start popping up alongside years that start with 18. The Colorado Rockies hit that point on Thursday night, after losing 2-0 to the Philadelphia Phillies to push their season record to 8-42. The Rockies are now sole owners of the worst 50-game start in baseball's modern era. You have to go all the way back to the 1895 Louisville Colonels, who started 7-43, to find a team that performed worse through its first 50 games. This team is squarely on the path trodden by the 2024 White Sox, who spent a good chunk of that campaign threatening to break the 1899 Cleveland Spiders' record for most losses in a season (134), but ultimately had to settle for the modern-era record (121). The Rockies are currently on pace to blow past the White Sox and pip the Spiders with 136 losses.
Thursday's loss unfolded like so many have, with the Rockies failing to score one measly run. The 2-0 loss accounted for the eighth time the Rockies have been shut out this season, and the 34th time they have failed to score more than three runs in a game. They are currently engaged in a three-team battle for offensive hopelessness with the White Sox and Pirates, but we'll give them the edge, given that they are only scoring 3.28 runs per game while playing home games at elevation.
Speaking of elevation, the worst thing about this Rockies team is not that they are losing at an historic pace, but how they are losing. At some point you have probably been made aware of the paradoxical relationship that exists between this franchise and its fans: Perhaps the worst-run ball club in the league, one that invests as little time and effort into winning baseball games as is humanly possible, still manages to draw decent attendance year after year. This is partly down to the fact that the ballpark is a nice place to hang out for a few hours, and partly because those fans value spectacle. The bargain that the Rockies' ownership group has made with the residents of Denver is one that allows them to go on running the franchise into the ground, so long as they provide a place for the fans to go see some dang elevation-aided dingers leave the yard.
This year's iteration of the Rockies can't even hold up their end of that lopsided deal. The Rockies currently have 43 home runs, fifth-fewest in the majors, and their team slugging percentage is a puny .361, fourth-worst in the league. This is the kind of thing that can turn just another losing season in Colorado into a scandalous one.
Scandal is perhaps the best Rockies fans can hope for, at this point. The Monfort family has gotten away with so much that it will take a truly historic accumulation of losses, acquired in novel and humiliating fashion, to raise the kind of public scrutiny necessary to affect attendance and pressure a sale of the team. They already fired Bud Black, cashing in the scapegoat card they had been holding onto for nine years, which leaves the spotlight of scrutiny nowhere to go but up. The Rockies always lose, and nothing changes. Maybe something will if they finally lose too often and too badly to ignore.
