Anyone paying attention knew that the 2025 Colorado Rockies were going to be a bad MLB team before they played a single baseball game.
Once the season got underway, it quickly became clear that they were going to flirt with being historically bad and most of the reasons why were predictable. Their lineup is extremely young and their pitching lacks talent.
But one element of this terrible team was truly a surprise. The bad defense.
On paper, this team should have been good, even potentially great, defensively but, of course that all fell apart too.
The three incumbents who have already proven their Gold Glove bonafides – Ryan McMahon, Ezequiel Tovar, and Brenton Doyle – all got off to awful starts and/or missed time due to injury. Michael Toglia, who was supposed to join them as a stalwart at first base, struck out so often it didn’t matter what his glove could do. McMahon also, notably, is no longer on the team.
With Tovar missing so much time, players were forced to move about the diamond with reckless abandon. Then, Mickey Moniak and Tyler Freeman emerged as the most consistent hitters in the lineup which was great except for the fact that they both bring with them negative defense, exacerbating the problem.
As such, like with most other categories, the Rockies have fallen to the bottom of the defensive charts.
In order for them to turn things around they will need to take massive steps forward here in the next several years but, again health permitting, should have an interesting mix of players to help get it done.
Kyle Karros already looks like the heir apparent at third base, possibly easing the loss of McMahon in the same way that McMahon eased the loss (defensively) of Nolan Arenado. Warming Bernabel has been what Toglia was only advertised to be and has shown to be a plus at the plate and first base so far.
The biggest question remains in the vast expansive outfield of Coors Field. The post-ASG stretch for Doyle has been extremely encouraging and he feels once again reliable as a top defender in center but the corner spots are rough.
Despite his athletic ability and the strides he made on offense this season, Jordan Beck is still a negative defender thanks to semi-regular bad reads and routes. If he can take a better approach and put in a bit of effort in the offseason to improve, he has the tools to be a plus defender.
There is hope that Zac Veen can finally put together what he has been doing in the minors and bring that to the Bigs, giving the Rockies potential in right field but in the meantime, they are stuck with Moniak and Freeman.
Regardless of how this all ultimately plays out, the fact remains that the Colorado Rockies absolutely have to prioritize defense when constructing their roster.
As previously discussed in this series, anything that can take some of the toll off the pitching staff is twice as valuable for the Denver team as it is for other clubs.
Take, for example, the walk-off win against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Monday night. Much was made about the limitations of Teoscar Hernandez with the glove and whether or not LA can live with his mistakes, given how much he brings with the bat.
Few have mentioned that, in almost any other ballpark, Hernandez would have caught that ball despite the slight misread and bad pre-play positioning. Now, recognize that the Rockies have to deal with those potentialities 81 times a season and you will see the value of guys who will make that catch with regularity.
Metrics can be all over the place on defense, especially at Coors, and we still don’t have the ability to measure fielding with the kind of accuracy that we can pitching and hitting. So it can be difficult to rely on defense to build out WAR and, therefore, wins.
But enough baseball has been played at Coors Field to see that the teams who manage to overcome the obstacles are the ones who play the most dynamic defense while making the fewest mistakes. Another way to think of it is to limit the chaos. The game of baseball and the ballpark itself already provide for quite a bit that you can’t control, but great defense is one of the rare constants in a ballplayer.
The 2007 Colorado Rockies that went all the way to the World Series famously set an MLB record for fielding percentage. And those two things were not unrelated.
Yes, it is still the case that, much like with the running game, defense can be compared to special teams in the NFL. If you can’t hit or pitch, it won’t matter how well you pick it or run the bases. But the Rockies are starting to build a core group of position players who have shown a lot of promise at the plate and plenty of good with the glove.
Time will tell whether or not they’ve got (or can get) enough pitching on the farm to turn this thing around but the best way to give those arms a fighting chance is to give them defenders that ease the pain rather than add to it.
