Why Troy Tulowitzki truly is the face of the franchise

Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports

The MLB Network is spending some time during the especially slow days of the off-season determining the “face of the franchise” for each team in baseball. Fans get the opportunity to vote on Twitter over a certain period of time and then the results are announced.

So, who is the face of the Colorado Rockies? Not surprisingly, shortstop Troy Tulowitzki won the voting.

The last five years of Colorado Rockies baseball can be summed up with any combination of the following words: frustration, anger, pressing with no results, disappointment, underachieving, hand-wringing, untapped potential, and a lot of promise never lived up to.

Does any player better embody those words than Tulo? He is a top five player in the league, and the fact that this team reached the playoffs in two of his first three seasons created genuine hope. This is a franchise player; his arrival in the big leagues coincided with the respective playoff berths in 2007 and 2009.

He was the face of success and now he is the face of frustration. When you think of Tulo’s last five seasons, you think of the disappointment of the injuries, the way that he visibly presses, the way he stares at umpires and curses on his way back to the bench. All of those words that sum up the disappointment of this franchise in the last five years…Tulo is living them. You watch him play, and even when he plays well and puts up monster numbers, you know that the state of the Rockies is just killing him.

Troy Tulowitzki wants to be a leader. He wants to be in the center of a playoff run. To me that means that he will be the face of this franchise no matter what happens as long as he dons that purple uniform. I just hope he is the face of a successful team again sometime before his time in Colorado is done.