The Royals have been the Rockies before

It’s terrible as a baseball fan for it to be April and your team is already hopeless.

It feels quite dramatic to say the season was on the brink for the Kansas City Royals before Tuesday’s game against the Colorado Rockies, but us fans were starting to get a little nervous. The Royals came into Tuesday’s game 9-14, fresh off an extremely disappointing road trip against the Cleveland Guardians, New York Yankees and Detroit Tigers. If things went poorly against the Rockies, as it looked like it might after Carlos Estevez blew his first save of the season in the first game of the series, the panic meter for the Royals might have reached 5 out of 5 Buddy Bells.

Thankfully, the Royals are now 12-14 and the fanbase can exhale after the home team swept the visiting Rockies. You have to take care of business against the bad teams; KC did that to great effect against the Chicago White Sox last season and it was nice to see them do it again against another truly awful team this year.

Seeing the games against the Rockies were a good reminder to me of how far the team has come from it’s wretched days, and even if the current Royals season ends up being a disappointment, the team has made progress and hafuture hope that I just don’t see right now in Colorado.

The Rockies are a poetic but pathetic 4-20 to start the season. They are already 12.5 games back of the NL West leading San Diego Padres and 10 games back of the fourth place Arizona Diamondbacks. It’s April 25th, and the Rockies season is already over.

We’ve been there as Royals fans! In 2023, the Royals went 7-21 in April, and never had more wins than losses in a month until September. Who can forget the 9-game losing streak in April of 2018 that really set the tone for an eventual 104 loss season. The 2012 Royals, a team always near to my heart, started 6-15 and zapped the energy out of Kauffman Stadium that had lots of excited fans at the games because of the All-Star game ticket packages. I’m sure many of us could do this all day; we Royals fans are no strangers to terrible starts to the year.

As I watched the Rockies this week though and tried to learn more about these players who I mostly had never heard of before, I felt like I was penetrating deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. Things look bleak for Colorado in a way that had me questioning if I had experienced anything that looks as hopeless as things do now for the Rockies.

First of all, their offense is truly horrible. As a team, they are currently hitting 36% below league average. You can’t even blame batted ball variance for their struggles; they have a .296 BABIP (the Royals have a .259 BABIP and can expect some positive variance to head their way). The Rockies right now just can’t make contact with the ball, as they sport a 29.6% K% (league average is 22.4%).

Not only is the team in a brutal slump, but the players who are slumping makes the already terrible situation even worse. Michael Toglia, who at least hit 25 home runs last year and looked like he could take a step forward in his age-26 season, instead is doing his best M.J. Melendez impersonation with a 18 wRC+ and a 42% K%. Ryan McMahon, their only name-brand player, has a 57 wRC+. Ezequiel Tovar doesn’t look like he’s ever going to be able to hit. Kris Bryant is still on this team and is signed through 2028.

Thanks to Coors Field, the Rockies are supposed to be able to hang their hats on offense! Instead, they’ve assembled what will almost certainly be one of the worst offensive teams in the league. They still haven’t solved the Coors Field conundrum for pitching either - they have a team ERA of 4.93 and a team FIP of 4.99. Chase Dollander is young and has potential, but has struggled in his first four starts of the season and if his game against the Royals is any indication, he doesn’t have the control you need as a major league starter. I’m not sure anyone in the Rockies rotation would start of Michael Lorenzen, the Royals #5 starter.

The NL West of it all doesn’t make things any easier. The Los Angeles Dodgers, destroyer of baseball economics, are currently in third place in this division. While I doubt that the Padres and San Francisco Giants stay ahead of the Dodgers all season, they have gotten off to nice starts and are clearly trying. The Diamondbacks are also a good team and are trying! Things can change fast in baseball, but none of these four teams seem like they are primed for a tear down and rebuild, and they all seem to be competently run.

Finally, the leadership of the Rockies leaves much to be inspired. If John Sherman ever cared to ask me, I’d be happy to give him some notes on how the stadium situation has been handled. He does, however, seem to really care about Kansas City and the Royals being a winning organization. Dick Monfort has certainly spent money on the Rockies, he’s no Bob Nutting, but his poor leadership and inability to keep up with the times in baseball sets the tone for the entire organization and has for years.

I’m not old enough to really remember the Ewing Kauffman Estate years, and while I do have more memories of the early David Glass years when he was too cheap to get Carlos Beltran signed to a contract, Glass really did change his ways and invest in a winning ball club. Monfort seems like an owner out of the late 90’s/early 2000’s era of Royals baseball, which is the only touchstone I have to a situation that looks this bleak.

You don’t hang any pennants that say “Better than the Rockies 2025,” so I don’t want to be too over-the-top in my praise. Still, we’ve been stuck in terrible situations as Royals fans before, and having a hopeless team roll into town this week reminded me of the progress the Royals have made. It sucks to have your baseball season effectively over in April and we know that from experience. I’m grateful that the Royals are still hanging around, hopefully turning things around, and giving us a good reason to stay invested in this club. As a wise sage once said “I never said it can’t get worse.”