The Colorado Rockies’ view up the National League West Division is as steep as the mountain range in their name.
With the month of May just days old, the Rockies are 6-28 and already a whopping 17.5 games out of first place — by far MLB’s greatest deficit — and playing a brand of terrible baseball rarely seen in the past century.
Colorado has already had separate eight-game losing streaks and a six-game slide. After taking back-to-back games last week for the team’s first winning streak this season, Colorado returned to its losing ways with three consecutive setbacks in San Francisco.
The Chicago White Sox, coming off a 2024 campaign that’s regarded as the worst in modern baseball history, are off to another terrible start at 10-25. However, they’re still considerably more competitive than Colorado at a mere 12 games back in the American League Central.
Colorado’s poor play stems from both sides of the 60 feet and 6 inches between home plate and the mound.
Rockies pitchers are 28th in the MLB in ERA (5.38) and 29th in walks plus hits per inning (1.56), and they’ve struck out the fewest number of opposing batters (225).
Colorado hitters are last in baseball in on-base plus slugging (.620), have struck out an MLB-high 344 times and have hit just 27 home runs, the fifth fewest in baseball. The lack of offense is particularly puzzling for a team that plays half its games at Coors Field, long considered the most hitter-friendly stadium in the MLB thanks to Denver’s ball-carrying thin air.
Just a few other dreadful teams in baseball history compare to Colorado this season.
-
Only the 1988 Baltimore Orioles had a worse 34-game start at 5-29 (.147), as the Birds crashed to 54-107 (.335) for the year.
-
The 1904 Washington Senators, who like the Rockies were 6-28 (.176) after 34 games, went on to be 38-113 (.252).
-
The 1932 Boston Red Sox were also 6-28, on their way to a 43-111 campaign (.279).
-
The 1904 Philadelphia Phillies were 6-27, with one tie, to start and wound up 52-100 (.342).
The Rockies, off to the worst start in baseball this year, are in contention for the worst start in 125 years, according to an NBC News analysis of Sports Reference standings data going back to 1901. At the team’s current pace, they will win their 10th game around Memorial Day weekend. Only one of the eight series between now and then is against a team with a losing record.
The 1916 Philadelphia Athletics have the worst single-season winning percentage in modern baseball history at 36-117 (.235) but got off to a relatively competitive 34-game start at 13-21.
So many of these historically bad teams come from the early 20th century when there was a smaller pool of talent and no MLB draft to help basement-dwelling clubs.
With those conditions, Daniel J. Eck, a statistics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who focuses on baseball and runs the Eck Sports Lab, said it’s more difficult to be this bad in modern times.
“Off the top of my head, I would initially expect there to be higher variability in team outcomes in 1904 than in 2025 due to shallower talent pools and no amateur draft which is designed to introduce parity,” Eck said in an email.
And it’s not like the Rockies are penny pinchers.
Colorado’s $125.5 million overall payroll is 20th out of 30 MLB teams, according the salary database Spotrac, with starting pitcher Kyle Freeland set to make a team-high $16 million this season.
The Tampa Bay Rays, ($89.5 million), A’s ($75.3 million), White Sox ($72.8 million) and Miami Marlins ($67.9 million) have the lowest team payrolls.
“Free agency counters this a bit as players know they can leave for big contracts and teams may be willing to trade their best players for prospects in order to get something in return beyond compensation draft picks,” Eck said. “Interestingly, the Rockies are not last in 2025 payroll.”
Rockies fans don’t seem to mind that much. The team, looking down the barrel of a third consecutive 100-loss season and seventh straight sub-.500 campaign, still finds itself at near-average attendance.
“Something I’ve noticed about the Rockies is that Rockies fans show up regardless of how the team is performing,” said Scott Powers, an assistant professor of sports analytics and statistics at Rice University. “But if revenue doesn’t depend on performance, there’s certainly less incentive (for team owners to improve the team).”
And there might be a touch of bad luck in the misery so far this year.
While Colorado’s run differential of -89 (106 runs scored and 195 surrendered) is the worst in the MLB, the Rockies’ Pythagorean winning percentage — a formula that roughly estimates how many wins a team should have, based on its runs scored and surrendered — puts them a hair short of eight wins out of these 34 games.
That formula, and variations on it, is important to the work many major league front offices do, said Powers, who was an assistant general manager of the Houston Astros.
“The big thing is simply that win-loss performance over the first 34 games of the season, you’re going to get some outliers, and those outliers are going to be due to some combination of performance and luck,” Powers said.
But does that mean there’s hope for the Rockies?
“It depends what you mean by hope,” Powers said. “If your hope is to run away with the division and have a bye in the first round of the playoffs, then that hope might be misplaced. But if your hope is to avoid losing 120 games, then I think it’s a very low probability at this point, that the Rockies have the kind of season that the White Sox had last year.”
