Despite pulling off a rare win on May 11, the Colorado Rockies terminated manager Bud Black afterward.
Colorado beat the San Diego Padres 9–3 on Sunday, a day after a 21–0 loss to the Padres. Losing had been too commonplace for the Rockies under Black amid the team’s 7–33 start, the worst record in the majors.
“Our play so far this season, especially coming off the last two seasons, has been unacceptable. Our fans deserve better, and we are capable of better,” Rockies owner, chairman and CEO Dick Monfort said in a statement on Sunday. “While we all share responsibility in how this season has played out, these changes are necessary.”
“We will use the remainder of 2025 to improve where we can on the field and to evaluate all areas of our operation so we can properly turn the page into the next chapter of Rockies baseball,” Monfort added.
Colorado’s dismal start reached historic proportions with the worst record through 40 games since 1988. That year, the Baltimore Orioles went 6–34. The Rockies’ dismal start matched the 1932 Boston Red Sox, 1928 Philadelphia Phillies, 1904 Washington Senators, and 1895 Louisville Colonels.
Opponents have outscored the Rockies by 128 runs. Only the Oakland Athletics had a worse run differential—144 at the start of 2023—over the past 125 years of MLB.
Black actually posted the best record among all Rockies managers, 544–690, since he began with the team in 2017 after a prior stint with the Padres.
Black led the Rockies to the playoffs in 2017 and 2018, but Colorado hasn’t fared well since. The Rockies have lost 100 or more games the past two seasons and haven’t won 70 or more games since 2021.
Colorado signed Black to a one-year contract extension in October 2024 despite a 61–101 record. He had a young team to work with in players such as Brenton Doyle, Chase Dollander, Ezequiel Tovar, and Zac Veen.
Doyle has only a .221 batting average this season, Tovar is batting .212 thus far, and Veen has a .118 average. Dollander hasn’t shined on the mound with a 7.71 ERA.
Colorado also terminated bench coach Mike Redmond on Sunday. Redmond had been with the Rockies since the 2017 season, when Black came on board.
The Rockies promoted third base coach Warren Schaeffer as the interim manager. Schaeffer, 40, played in the Rockies minor league system before his coaching career, which began in 2015 as a minor league coach. He became the Rockies’ third base coach in 2022.
Clint Hurdle will serve as the bench coach in an ironic twist to his second stint with the Rockies. Hurdle coached the Rockies from 2002 to 2009 when he previously had the best managerial record in franchise history.
That included a World Series run in 2007, when the team lost to the Boston Red Sox. Hurdle had a 534–625 record with the Rockies before the team fired him amid an 18–28 start in 2009.
Hurdle then managed the Pittsburgh Pirates from 2011 to 2019 before he came out of retirement to rejoin the Rockies in 2021 as a special assistant to the general manager.
When the Rockies fired Hurdle in 2009, the team turned things around under interim manager Jim Tracy with a 92–70 record and an NLDS appearance. This year’s Rockies team would need a meteoric turnaround to do likewise—they’re 19 ½ games behind the first-place Los Angeles Dodgers (27–14).
As for Black, it wasn’t the first time he has been fired from an MLB manager role. The Padres fired him in 2015 when the team started 32–33 despite an otherwise competitive run there. He had a 649–713 record with the Padres in eight seasons, which included four second- or third-place finishes in the NL West.
The Epoch Times reached out to Black for comment, but did not hear back by publication time.
