Colorado Rockies: 3 numbers that show the good, the bad, and the ugly

The Colorado Rockies head into Memorial Day being three games under .500 through 51 games (24-27), which is just under a one-third of the season. Obviously, that is worse than the Rockies had hoped for this far into the season. From those 51 games, there are a few interesting numbers for the team.

The Colorado Rockies enter Memorial Day in 4th place in the NL West, already 10 games back of the 2-time reigning NL Champion Los Angeles Dodgers and three back of each the DBacks and Padres for 2nd place. Even more startling, they are already 4.5 games back of the 2nd Wild Card spot.

In the 51 games that they have played, there has been some good, bad, and ugly numbers from that span. Today, we will look at one of each of those numbers.

The good

Tony Wolters is 2nd in the NL in baserunners caught stealing.

Despite doubts from many fans and others (myself included), Tony Wolters has been excellent for the Rockies thus far this season. He enters Memorial Day hitting .309/.352/.446, which is much improved from his .170/.292/.286 last season. Defensively, he has maintained being excellent.

Last season, he had 12 Defensive Runs Saved, per Baseball Reference, in 64 games behind the plate. This season, entering Sunday, in exactly half of the games he had last year (32), he has exactly half of the DRS (6).

Also, entering Sunday, he had the second best rate of catching would-be base stealers, as he has caught 45 percent of runners, per the Rockies PR team. The only NL catcher that has been better, thus far, has been Phillies catcher JT Realmuto, who has caught 50 percent of runners.

With those offensive and defensive numbers, Wolters could even find himself in Cleveland in July as an All-Star for the Rockies.

The bad

Mark Reynolds is 1-for-18 in pinch hitting appearances.

With the call up of Brendan Rodgers as well as Ryan McMahon and Daniel Murphy playing very often, Mark Reynolds has, by and large, been relegated to pinch-hitting duties.

However, he has not done well in that area.

If you check out his game logs on Baseball Reference, you can see that the first (and only) time he was successful at pinch hitting was all the way back on April 8th at Coors Field against the Braves, when he hit a 2-run home run. That was during the Rockies first homestand.

Since then, he is 0-for-16 with 3 walks, including Sunday’s pinch-hit walk that he had in the 9th inning, when the Rockies had the bases loaded via 3 walks, which was followed by a Tony Wolters sac fly that sent Rockies fans home happy.

Considering that his main job is pinch hitting, you need to see a bit more success with it than Reynolds has had. I’d expect it to be lower than most averages since you’re coming of the bench after not swinging a bat for 2 or 2.5 hours but an .055 batting average is way worse than you should expect.

However, that is not as ugly as the next number we have for you.