We Found the Worst MLB Team Ever Assembled

Free Friday Newsletter

Hi friends-

Thank you for being patient with me as I deal with my third round of Covid (which apparently still exists, woof). We will have our usual baseball zoom at 12 PM PT tomorrow (Saturday), and I’ll send out the link in the morning.

Catching this beast of a virus is fraught for me, as the first time I contracted it at the All-Star Game at Dodger Stadium in the summer of 2022 I became disabled with POTS for six months, which I still have to manage to combat long covid fatigue.

Anyway, this round was not as bad as the first one, but worse than the second time I caught it at a Harry Styles concert in 2023. I’m OK, nothing scary happened except a 102 temperature that had me seeing pink elephants out my window— and now I’m on the mend. But I still cough for much of the night, which means I sleep for a lot of the day. It’s 2 pm and I just woke up. This is v disorienting as I’m a person who wakes up at 7 am on the dot every day. My dog is ready to call the walkies police.

But all this time at home on the couch and in bed has meant I’ve watched a lot of baseball. (I think I hallucinated the Dodgers getting swept by the Angels?? And also the Padres and Angels playing each other and then immediately doing a Freaky Friday with Anaheim winning seven in a row and San Diego dropping six straight??)

One thing none of us have hallucinated, however, is just how horrendous the Colorado Rockies are. Through the season’s first fifty games, they are 8-42. I repeat: 8-42.

The Rockies are 8-42 and everyone is just going about their days. The Rockies are 8-42 and some of you are out running errands!!

As far as I can tell, this is the worst 50-game opening stretch for an MLB team since the Louisville Colonels started the 1895 season at 7-43.

It was two years ago this week that Bryce Harper got mad at the Rockies and screamed “You’re a f—-g loser organization! Every single one of you!”

Things have only gotten worse since then. Harper was on the field yesterday as the Phillies completed their first-ever four game sweep at Coors, probably feeling vindicated. Or, more likely, humiliated. This is a rubbish organization that is humiliating the sport, and baseball sickos like Harper—and me!!!— are offended to the core by the product they’re putting out.

Rockies owner/Lord Dick Monfort can whine all he wants about a salary cap. Six teams spend less on player salary than the Rockies this year, and they’re all better than Colorado. A salary cap would not make the Rockies better. It would just be another anti-labor shiv from a billionaire who does not need the money. Monfort should have no place in the next round of labor negotiations, but since everything is f—d right now, I expect him to be driving the bus with A’s Lord John Fisher, straight off a cliff.

While I was reporting my book in the summer of 2013, the Dodgers ripped off a run where they went 42-8, which at that time was the best 50 game stretch in baseball history, until the same Dodgers went 41-9 a few years later. During the 2013 stretch, Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke were on generational heaters and nobody could get rookie Yasiel Puig out. But just as important, everything possible broke their way. They didn’t do this with Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts. They did it with Nick Punto and Skip Schumaker and Mark Ellis and Paco Rodriguez. It was the most insane and fun stretch of baseball I’ve ever seen.

What the Rockies are doing right now is the spiritual opposite of what the Dodgers did that summer. They have not won a single series. They’ve been shutout 8 times. They have been swept seven times. They are now 18 games out of….fourth place in the NL West.

Here’s Jack Baer of Yahoo! Sports with more of the gory details:

• They have won consecutive games only once this season, with three different eight-game losing streaks.

• Their minus-159 run differential is not just the worst in MLB (nearly double the second-worst Baltimore Orioles, who are minus-85). They are on pace for a minus-515 run differential, which would be the worst mark in MLB history by more than 100 runs.

• They lost a game 21-0 to the San Diego Padres, a margin worse than any loss the White Sox took last year. They were shut out by a Rule 5 draft pick making his second career start in that game.

• They are the worst offense in MLB by wRC+, which weighs park factors, at 66. Even granting them the advantage of Coors Field sees them post a .646 team OPS, third-worst in MLB.

• Their pitching staff is fifth-worst in MLB by ERA- at 125, which again weighs Coors Field. Without that consideration, their 5.82 team ERA is easily worst in MLB.

• Their starting pitchers have a 6.86 ERA. All eight Los Angeles Dodgers pitchers with multiple starts this season have a better number.

• They are the worst fielding team in MLB by some metrics as well, such as -33 defensive runs saved.

• They are 3-13 against the NL West, a division with no other clubs below .500.

• Despite three straight last-place finishes and no winning records since 2018, their minor-league system came in as only the 18th-best on MLB Pipeline's preseason rankings. The Dodgers, who have not picked higher than 20th since 2013, were fourth.

• Kris Bryant, the largest free-agent splash in club history, is on the injured list dealing with a lumbar degenerative disease that sounds hard to come back from and has been placed on the IL nine times since 2022. He has slashed .222/.307/.335 over the past three seasons.

The White Sox have been a national punching bag for the past few seasons during their rebuild….but at least they are rebuilding! Baseball America had the Southsiders minor league system ranked fourth coming into the season; MLB.com had them 6th.

This is because they knew they stunk, and so they traded guys like Garrett Crochet, Michael Kopech, Eric Fedde, and Tommy Pham for young major leaguers and minor league prospects. The Rockies refuse to do this.

They did not trade Trevor Story or Jon Gray when they were at their highest value. They got bupkis for Nolan Arenado. They’ve got a decent trade chip right now in Ryan McMahon, but have been reluctant to move him because he’s reportedly a favorite of Monfort’s. Cool. What are we even doing here?

It is difficult for me to ask any MLB executive in the NL West about the Rockies without hearing a bunch of expletives. You would think the rest of the league enjoys fattening up their records while playing them—and they do— but the Rockies ineptitude, and Monfort’s audacity to speak like he’s a guy with the answers on how to improve the sport has people seething.

We often mourn how cut-throat and brutal this business can be. Last week, the Dodgers cut both Austin Barnes and Chris Taylor: two players instrumental to the club’s last decade of dominance. Had they been Rockies, Monfort might have kept them around for five more years simply because he liked them (and also because they’re probably better than anyone else on that roster right now outside of McMahon and Jordan Beck.)

The Rockies average 25,708 home fans a game, which is 18th best out of 30 teams. This is because Denver is a great sports town and people who live their enjoy spending time outside. Monfort is getting rich(er) off the Rockies, which he doesn’t deserve. And if the league cared about the franchise, which they don’t, he’d be forced out, like Frank McCourt was run from Los Angeles 13 years ago.

Denver often boasts some of the highest quality of life scores in America, with it’s great music scene (hello Red Rocks!), proximity to nature, and (relatively) affordable housing compared to places like California. I am guessing the residents who score it 10/10 do not follow the Rockies. Their ineptitude would cause any self-respecting baseball fan to either give up or move.