W(H)ITHER THE ROCKIES??

Note: the "C" here does not stand for "Colorado"--read on!

COULD the lowest of the low turn out to be the team that plays at the highest altitude?

That's what a larger & larger slice of the baseball media is surmising, as they unerringly zero in on the "catastrophe scenario" that has become legion in all aspects of American life--reaching its nadir last November, bringing us the punctuated disequilibrium of chaos on top of travesty.

Thus the Colorado Rockies--always the game's square peg--have become the latest franchise catastrophe in a roundelay that no longer insulates large markets from baseball's version of the "drunk tank." They've been bad for quite awhile, but in a low-key way: given that they seem to exist apart from everyone else, creating cartoon-like games in the thin air of their home park, it seems that everyone (including the Rox' owners) have just considered their foibles to be fait accompli.

BUT now they've gotten so bad--and the timing of their badness is in sync with a recent epidemic of catastrophic teams, all seemingly intent on eclipsing the gauntlet of ineptitude thrown down by the 1962 Mets--that they can no longer be ignored. As of June 2 in this catastrophic year of 2025, they've started the season by winning just nine times in fifty-nine games--the worst start of a season by anyone.

And the media is all over it, with the requisite allusions to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who won just 20 games in a year where 95% of their talent had been strip-mined away from them by something that we are witnessing in full force in 2025: massive, pandemic-level corruption.

But even the Spiders won 11 of their first 59 games. Of course 11-48 was the best part of their season...after that it was le deluge: the ravaged creepy crawly folk went 9-86 (!!!) the rest of the way. They finished with an inverse flourish, losing 40 of their last 41 games. (Those with a serious masochistic bent are directed to J. Thomas Hetrick's Misfits! for an exhaustive exhumation of this singular travesty. "Exhausting" might be the better adjective, however...)

It's so convenient: our wise guy only has to change one letter
in order to re-use this sign in 2025...

IN keeping with the malingering malaise that is cascading through America at this moment, though, it appears that a not-insignificant portion of the media is beginning to root for a kind of "Spiders redux" outcome for the Rockies. It's easier to get into this variant of "doomscrolling" when it kicks in at the start--none of this "collapse at the end" nonsense...if you're going to stink up the joint, fold early and stay folded, goddammit! Even though some folk were ready to invoke the star-crossed Spiders last year when the White Sox found themselves in a endless "flush cycle," the problem for the wise guy in the picture was that the Sox waited too long to metastasize--they'd already won too many games when they went into free-fall. 

SO here are the Rox (not the Sox...) doing it from the get-go and keeping the foot off the pedal as their opponents rip them apart. Some folks are going to be really annoyed if they emerge from their acute catastrophe phase and become merely bad. But that's what is likeliest to happen: unlike last year's catastrophe model, they cratered too early to wallow in decrepitude for an entire season. 

How do we know this? Admittedly, the data is not 100% foolproof, but it has had an unwavering pattern when ineptitude is the sole reason at play--remember, the Spiders' season in Hell was arsoned into inferno status by corruption. That's not in the picture for the Rox.

AT left, here are all the teams with 59-game collapses in the same forlorn region as Denver's high-flown low-lifes. It turns out 9-50 isn't the worst such skein, even leaving the Spiders out of it. The 1916 Philadelphia A's had the worst of it--four times, bottoming out at 4-55. Last year's "catastrophe model," the White Sox, went 8-51 from July 4 to mid-September and looked like a lock to get under those fabled Metsies--but they only got half the job done, losing one more than "Casey Stengel's follies" but winning one more as well. 

The 2021 D-backs also had a 9-50 stretch from May into July, but they won 52 games and wound up being merely bad. Same with the 2012 Astros. The pattern is the same for all the other teams in this same region of 59-game collapse: the 1969 Padres, the 1949 Senators, the 1932 Red Sox, the 1923 Boston Braves, and a troika of A's teams (1915, 1937, 2023). 

WHAT happens, as the "Outside Span" column demonstrates, is that all these teams have an inverse regression to the mean and become merely bad over the balance of the season. Taken as a group, and adjusting the end-of-year projection up to apportion 162 games to the reeling Rox, these teams went 39-64 in the remainder of the season. (As you can see, that's exactly the record that the 2023 A's posted after their eye-popping start that season.)

When we apply that aggregate to the Rox, and add it up, it suggest that they will finish the season with a 48-114 record. Granted, that is somewhat worse than merely bad, but neither is it an all-time record for futility.

TO give you the other side of the range--the worst "worst case scenario"--we point to the Rox' "Pythagorean Won-Loss Record" or "PWP" thus far in '25 (which is figured by a formula using their runs scored vs. their runs allowed). Right now, that works out to a .220 WPCT. If they can hold that pace from now to the end of the season, they'd finish with a record of 36-126, which would indeed be the worst since 1899.

There are twelve teams shown in the table above: ten of the eleven on it before the Rox joined them all cleared the 1962 Mets' .250 WPCT with relative ease. Last season's Sox pulled out of a mid-season free-fall (7-44 over July and August) to post a merely bad 10-15 record in September to partially evade a desiccated date with destiny. Chances are extremely high that the Rox will do the same over the balance of the 2025 season.

BUT, then again..."now batting third for the Rockies, Arthur Rimbaud"...

Stay tuned!