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Pick a lane, Rockies.
If it’s me, I’m selling everything that isn’t nailed down. If someone wants to take Charlie Blackmon’s $18.33 million salary and player option off my hands, groovy.
German Marquez? I’m listening. No cow is too sacred when you come out of the All-Star Break 18.5 games out of first, 6.5 games out of the last National League Wild-Card slot.
C.J. Cron? Daniel Bard? Jose Iglesias? Make an offer. No one is untouchable when you’re staring at a second half that features 39 out of your next 69 games on the road, 37 of your next 69 against division opponents, and the hardest remaining schedule in Major League Baseball, according to Fangraphs.com.
Pick a lane, Rockies.
Either offer what’s left on the farm — speedy outfielder Zac Veen, shortstop Ezequiel Tovar chief among them — in a package to the Washington Nationals to bring Home Run Derby champ Juan Soto from D.C. to Coors Field … or tear it down, piece by piece.
Enough with the stasis. Enough with the half-measures. Enough with the false hope. Enough with building a roster to win 78-79 games and trusting the fates gift you another four or five victories along the way. Enough of this weaving through traffic, slowly, while you’re being passed on both the left and the right.
Pick a lane, Rockies.
Either replicate Tampa Bay to the letter — better yet, poach a bunch of the pieces from the Rays’ front office — or follow the Orioles’ lead.
Remember them? Beautiful park. Sorry big-league roster. Deep division. Hopeless odds. So many giants, literal and imaginative, to jump.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The NL West is the AL East, and vice versa.
The O’s melted everything down. They checked out on the big club and built up from below. Adley Rutschman, the best catching prospect since Buster Posey and their next franchise cornerstone, is already here. Pitcher Grayson Rodriguez, tabbed by MLB.com’s rankings as the No. 6 overall prospect in baseball, is coming soon.
Eight players on their active roster, including former Rox prospect Tyler Nevin, are 26 years old or younger. The Baby Birds open the second half of the MLB season with a better record than the Rockies (46-46 to Colorado’s 43-50). Baltimore’s closer in the AL Wild Card standings than the Rox are in the NL (3.5 games back to the Rockies’ 6.5).
Pick a lane, Rockies.
In a world where the smart teams can sell the idea of winning now or winning someday, don’t be content to just sell beer.
The Rockies have help coming on the farm — Veen turned heads while swiping bases at the Futures Game this past weekend — but that help is a ways off.
MLB.com in the preseason ranked GM Bill Schmidt’s farm system as No. 24 in the league, up from 27th in the winters of 2021 and 2020, but probably not deep enough or sexy enough to use as big-time trade chips now.
Pick a lane, Rockies.
Either double down on the kids or double down on the grown-ups. Blackmon, Bard and Iglesias are in contract years. Cron and Marquez are headed for the same in 2023. If this is your core, get them more help. If it isn’t, there’s no shame in moving along.
But the worst thing this franchise can do over the next fortnight is replicate what it did last July, as teams sniffed around for Trevor Story and Jon Gray — and that’s doing nothing.
According to a 2022 study published in the Journal of Sports Analytics, players drafted and signed by MLB teams from 2005-2015 in the first round had a 71.5% chance of eventually reaching The Show. But the odds dropped to 52.2% — a coin flip, essentially — in the second, and the chances slid steadily for each subsequent round after that.
Bard is a good guy and an even better comeback tale. But what good is a star closer on a team whose ceiling is fourth in its division? That’s old-school GM thinking, a shining example of resources wasted.
For one thing, set-up man Alex Colome, one of the better signings from Schmidt’s March 2022 shopping spree, can close.
For another, a stud closer on a mediocre team is a new roof on a 2-room shanty, a set of ’22 Michelins on a ’77 Gremlin.
Yes, you need those wheels to get when you’re going. Yes, anyone who can transform the ninth inning at Coors Field from a horror show (Wade Davis) to a foregone conclusion (Bard) ought to be a candidate for beatification, let alone the All-Star Game.
But if an ace reliever is the difference between 73 wins and 79 and not between 83 wins and 90, it’s not the rims. It’s the ride.
Promising greatness on all fronts while trailing the big boys by almost 20 games doesn’t make you tough. Or clever. It makes you the Angels.
Pick a lane, Rockies. And not the one for bikes, either.
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