A Very Coors-y Christmas: Presents, Stocking Stuffers and Coal

The Colorado Rockies and Offseason Moves: Coal

If you’re ever in a gift exchange and you end up with a bad gift, you better hope Jeff Bridich isn’t in your group because the chances he’ll trade you if you ask him to will be as likely as Wade Davis having a 1-2-3 inning at Coors.

The Winter Meetings came and the Winter Meetings left with the roster looking basically exactly the same as it looked coming into them. The only notable additions the Rockies made were adding Tyler Kinley to the bullpen and signing Drew Butera to a minor league contract. While there are definitely needs for upgrades in the bullpen and at and catcher, these would hardly qualify as upgrades and really are questionable moves in themselves.

Were you hoping that maybe they’d try to shed some payroll and trade off some names like Wade Davis, Bryan Shaw and Daniel Murphy? Well you’re a fool for thinking that was even a possibility (don’t worry, that makes me a fool too).

Bridich’s prior comments about the team being strapped for cash this offseason already set low expectations for what would come, but it doesn’t even feel like a real effort was made to honestly better this team. That leads to the fact that he feels the current roster can go back out and immediately jump back into contention. Now last season had a lot go wrong, but it also exposed a lot of weaknesses that should’ve been addressed.

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Instead, Bridich is banking on the following things:

• Wade Davis will bounce back
• Kyle Freeland‘s issues were solely blister related and he will bounce back
• Daniel Murphy will be a better player overall and his dropoff last season isn’t indicative of his future
• Ian Desmond decides to hit every single ball in the air instead of consistently drilling balls into the ground in an attempt to lower the overall elevation of Coors Field in an effort to dispel the Coors narrative
• Ryan McMahon continues to progress and/or Brendan Rodgers comes back healthy and rakes at 2B as promised
• The rest of the bullpen outside of Oberg (who was extended during the Winter Meetings so it’s not *all* bad for the Rockies this offseason) pitch close to league average
• The 4th and 5th spots in the rotation are filled by MLB capable pitchers (or Peter Lambert improves and Chi Chi Gonzalez‘s September is repeated every single month of the season)
• Tony Wolters barrels at least one baseball

That is a lot to bank on to get back into serious contention. And Bridich has done nothing to truly address any of the glaring issues this team has. If the plan is to truly bank on the current roster, then it’d be smart to take away some of the expensive, older pieces that haven’t performed and replace them with the younger players.

While Davis, Shaw and Murphy wouldn’t get back the Rockies all that much in terms of value, it’d be worth it to get them off the books ahead of time to clear up payroll and provide more financial flexibility to be able to extend guys like Story. It might even clear up some room to bring in a big name free agent down the road (although that’s likely a pipe dream given this Front Office’s *checks notes*……ah yes, entire history).

Hopefully, in the next few months the Rockies do surprise us and make some moves that actually do improve this team. But with the only real moves to date being the additions of Kinley and Butera, I’m not hopeful.