Success at the MLB level is difficult. Ask the Colorado Rockies, who haven’t had a winning season for the last five years.
There will always be top tier organizations; where the ones with the biggest payrolls will buy, sign, and trade for only the very best premium talent that will keep them in a championship hunt. Then, there are the clubs who are designated “small market”, and will struggle to field a competitive lineup.
The 2025 season, now a quarter of the way through its schedule, is turning out to be historically embarrassing for the Rockies. Through 43 games, they are 7–36. Heading into the desert for a weekend series with the Arizona Diamondbacks, the ballclub has won but two games on the road.
The Rockies have won just one game in their last 10. After a day off on Thursday, the club is scheduled to play 13 games in as many days, so “righting the ship” needs to happen on the fly.
Indeed, help may be on the way. There is progress, however subtle, as the Rockies take baby steps towards reversing their failures on the field as the season progresses for the 32-year-old franchise based in Denver.
On May 11, one day after the Rockies registered an embarrassing 21–0 loss to the San Diego Padres in Southern California, the writing was on the dugout wall—something had to be done.
The popular skipper, Bud Black, in Denver since 2017, was fired.
Richard Monfort, club owner, chairman, and CEO, reached out to fans via the Rockies’ X platform to relay his disappointment in how the season was going.
“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’ General Manager Bill Schmidt hasn’t remained idle in his attempts to turn the club around. Back in April, before dismissing Black and replacing him with third base coach Warren Schaeffer as the club’s interim manager, he gave hitting coach Hensley Meulens his walking papers. Joining Black in cleaning out his locker on the same day was Rockies’ bench coach Mike Redmond. When the club was floundering during the 2021 season, Schmidt asked then-GM Jeff Bridich to step down.
To aid Schaeffer as a rookie manager, the Rockies called on an old friend to put his spikes back on for the sake of the organization. Clint Hurdle left semi-retirement in Southwest Florida for a full-time baseball repairs job in the Rocky Mountains. Hurdle, a former Rockies’ skipper who in 2007 led the organization to the National League pennant, had been working as a special assistant since 2021 to the general manager. With Meulens’s dismissal, Hurdle took up the hitting coach duties. When Black was shown the door, Hurdle’s role with the club was upgraded to bench coach.
With the Rockies coming off consecutive 100-plus loss seasons, anything less than a coaching “musical chairs” approach by upper management wouldn’t be tolerated by their fans.
The Rockies aren’t the only team to make changes early in the 2025 National League season. On May 8, the Pittsburgh Pirates fired manager Derek Shelton, after a 12–26 start. At the time Shelton was asked to leave his post, the National League Central club was in the midst of a seven-game losing streak. In his sixth season as Pirates’ skipper, Shelton was replaced with his bench coach Don Kelly.
Ironically, the Rockies, already at an insurmountable 21.5 games behind the division-leading Los Angeles Dodgers, were a better-performing club during their inaugural season of 1993.
That first season of Rockies baseball under manager Don Baylor brings back vivid and fond memories for Rick Mathews, the club’s bullpen coach.
Mathews, 77, recalls the competitiveness of the roster assembled by general manager Bob Gebhard as anything but expansion-like.
“In the expansion draft, we [Rockies] picked up Joe Girardi, Charlie Hayes, Freddie Benavides was at shortstop, Vinnie Castilla, and traded for Dante Bichette,” Mathews told The Epoch Times by phone on Thursday from his home in South-Central Iowa.
Mathews, who remains in the Rockies’ organization as a part-time scout and senior development adviser working with minor league pitchers, remembers the 1993 season in Colorado, personally, as indescribable.
“From my perspective, being with the club was a dream come true. Colorado waited a long time for a team. It was the first in the Mountain Time. When I joined the club in May, that was the first time for me on a big league staff. Growing up in a town of 500, then being in a stadium with 80,000-plus fans, it was just unbelievable.”
His take on the 2025 struggling Rockies? Mathews offers a basic approach to turning the tide from losing to winning more games.
“The players have to be there for each other. They must stay positive. As big leaguers, they will figure this out.”
If an expansion Rockies club in 1993 could finish the season 67–95, the 2025 version in Colorado can aim for the same or better finish. Last season, the Chicago White Sox had a 21-game losing streak and finished the season 41–121, the worst record in modern MLB history.
Colorado management is shuffling leadership to make sure Chicago’s dubious distinction doesn’t get erased, come October.
