August 30, 2016

Rubbing Mud

Incremental Improvement In Denver

by Matthew Trueblood

The long season plays cruel tricks on every team, and if it sometimes gives great and wonderful things (as it did to the 2007 Rockies, flinging a merely good team into the World Series), it usually comes to collect on that advance later on. This summer, Father Baseball pointed the Rockies in precisely the wrong direction in the second half of July. A mediocre team without a real chance to contend in the NL this year, the Rockies got hot at just the wrong time—coming out of the All-Star break with 14 wins in 19 games—and made no trades before the deadline. In D.J. LeMahieu, Carlos Gonzalez, and Charlie Blackmon, Colorado has three players whose long-term value is dubious, and who will be free agents by the end of 2018 (Gonzalez after 2017), but who would have had real trade value in this market. At least one of those guys should be somewhere else right now. Heck, after the dust settled and Will Smith commanded such a significant price, Jeff Bridich looked a little less than brilliant even for leaving Jake McGee’s market unplumbed.

That’s a small blemish, though, on what is becoming an increasingly impressive track record for a front office long maligned, a front office that seems to be an extension of the one Dan O’Dowd headed up for so long (Bridich was an O’Dowd hire, and already had been part of the Rockies organization for a decade when he got the GM job), but which has turned sharply in a good direction since O’Dowd and Bill Geivett departed. For a long time, O’Dowd fought to find the formula for success at Coors Field. He tried many things, including non-traditional starting rotations, organization-wide emphasis on certain pitches or approaches, and more than one brief dive into stat-centric analysis. Brian Kenny said, in a recent interview, that O’Dowd has talked a fair bit about analytics since joining MLB Network, and lamented the resistance to implementing it at some levels even in a franchise of which he was the baseball chief.

I don’t purport to know whether the Rockies are doing more or less analytical work than they used to do. I do know that they’ve made some apparent commitment to finding pitchers who can get groundballs consistently with their four-seam fastballs, and that the Bridich-led front office wants to get away from pigeonholing players, especially pitchers—that they believe they can get more out of players by looking for talented ones who might be capable of making a significant change, and by focusing on players’ strengths, rather than their weaknesses. The specific systems they have in place, the changes they’ve made in key personnel positions, all of that is interesting and valuable information I just don’t have. Whatever the explanation, though, the Rockies have the 17th-best DRA- in baseball this year—the best they’ve been since 2010. They’re doing that with Jon Gray, and with Tyler Chatwood and Tyler Anderson, but also with relief pitchers like Boone Logan (a much-maligned free-agent signing that has panned out brilliantly), Adam Ottavino, and Carlos Estevez. They also have a great core of positional talent. Nolan Arenado, Trevor Story, and David Dahl make the building blocks of a winner, and there are Brendan Rodgers, Raimel Tapia, and Forrest Wall behind them.

Here’s one more reason to believe the future might finally be getting brighter in Colorado. In my opinion, it’s the most important reason. The following are all trades the Rockies made this winter:

• Corey Dickerson and Kevin Padlo to the Rays, in exchange for McGee and German Marquez

• Tommy Kahnle to the White Sox, in exchange for Yency Almonte

• Rex Brothers to the Cubs, in exchange for Wander Cabrera

Those were all relatively small moves (although some combination of name value and the time of year at which it was made led the Dickerson deal to draw significant attention), but in each, the Rockies traded away players with unique talents, but whom they had tried at length in Colorado, without success, and in each, they got back a pitching prospect who has had a very good season in their strong farm system. These aren’t top-100, high-impact prospects, at least not right now. They’re small, important steps in the right direction, though.

Coors Field isn’t a problem a baseball team can solve, physically. It’s disproportionately rewarding to certain kinds of players, and disproportionately harsh on other kinds, but not to such an extent that it would ever be wise to build around the particular skills the park rewards most, or to totally avoid players who seem ill-suited to it. For too long, O’Dowd’s front office focused on finding the right players for them (in more ways than one), when they should have simply been looking for the best players they could acquire. In particular, because playing at Coors Field distorts the perceived value of almost every player, in one way or another, there’s an opening for a methodical, dedicated front office to do something akin to what Kyle MacDonald did a little over a decade ago, trading up from one red paperclip to a house in a little over a year.

It takes what MacDonald had: patience, a willingness to make incremental progress and to go out of his way to make the right deal, and a keen eye for what someone else might value highly. If Coors Field creates some gap in valuation of almost all players, then small moves are the right way for the Rockies to go. The higher the value of the players changing hands in a deal, the wider that gap between how Colorado sees them and how their trade partner sees them (or how the player sees himself, in the case of free-agent negotiations) can be. That makes getting a good deal difficult—maybe even impossible. Three times in a row this winter, though, Bridich proved that small-scale moves can turn that valuation gap into both an exploitable inefficiency and a greaser of the wheels. If the Rockies understand the inevitable differences between the way they value certain players and the way other teams value them (sometimes 29 other teams, sometimes just one or two), as they now seem to do, then they'll have a chance to keep alive that streak of sound moves. Eventually, a franchise recently buried as deeply under accumulating mediocrity as any in the majors might be able to emerge as a more normal, more consistently competitive one.

Matthew Trueblood is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @MATrueblood
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