Colorado Rockies: Ranking the 40-Man Roster: 36-31

Our countdown of the Colorado Rockies 40-man roster continues today with an interesting mix of players in various stages of their careers. We start by dissecting a tie in our rankings.

As a reminder, we compiled this list by asking each of our six contributors to Rox Pile to rank each member of Colorado’s 40-man roster from 1-40. To reach our final standings, we combined the points to see who fit where. The more points, the lower the ranking.

Number 36 (Tie)

Antonio Senzatela: Right Handed Pitcher Points: 216 Highest Rank: 34 Lowest: 39

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We covered Senzatela in more detail a few weeks ago in our Colorado Rockies prospect countdown. While he’s never been considered a top prospect by most, Senzatela has produced outstanding numbers at nearly every stop of his career thus far. Since his minor league debut five seasons ago, Senzatela has a 41-19 record, a 2.45 ERA and a 1.06 WHIP across four different levels of play.

So why so low on the list? Well, first off, no one is sure how long Senzatela’s arm will hold up. He spent most of the 2016 season on the disabled list after being shut down with shoulder inflammation in June, and while the hope is that he’s back to full strength, there’s no guarantee Senzatela’s shoulder can hold up to the demands of being in a big league rotation.

Even if Senzatela is fully healthy for the entire season, he’ll still have a hard time carving out a role on the big league club in 2017. In all likelihood, he’ll open the season in Double-A, where Colorado will take things slowly and monitor his workload. If he pitches well, a call-up to Triple-A is certainly possible, but it would probably take a rash of injuries for the Rockies to call up Senzatela anytime soon.

It’s hard to put Senzatela high in the 40-man roster ranking for these reasons, but that doesn’t mean we’re down on him necessarily. He’s a young, talented pitcher who probably won’t have a large role in Denver this season. However, in a few years, I would expect him to rank higher on this list.

It’s fitting then, that he ended up tied in the rankings with another player that could be described in a very similar fashion…