Colorado Rockies: The top five reasons why they should not sign Trevor Bauer

Yesterday, we presented the top five reasons why the Colorado Rockies should sign the reigning NL Cy Young Award winner, Trevor Bauer. Today, we present the reasons why they shouldn’t sign him.

2020 NL Cy Young award winner and free-agent starting pitcher Trevor Bauer and his agent, Rachel Luba, were recently in Denver for a “work trip” (and then, yesterday, Luba posted on her Instagram story that she was in Scottsdale, which, coincidentally, is the Rockies Spring Training home), fueling speculation that they may have spoken with the Colorado Rockies about signing with the team.

Yesterday, we made the case for our top five reasons to sign Bauer (and our friends over at Purple Row also made their case too, with some different reasons that are also very good) but as with any acquisition, there are pros and cons, from both the player and team perspective. Today, we will present the top five reasons why the Rockies should *not* sign Bauer this offseason.

In no particular order, let’s check out the reasons why they shouldn’t sign him.

It could prevent the Rockies from keeping Trevor Story and/or Nolan Arenado

While one of our points that we made for signing Bauer yesterday is that Story, Arenado, and the rest of the team would see that the Rockies are truly trying to go for it. However, it could mean that the Rockies may not be able to afford Trevor Story and/or Nolan Arenado, especially since they lost tens of millions in 2020 with fewer games and no fans were able to attend games.

Arenado could opt-in to the remainder of his contract after the 2021 season but Story will definitely be a free agent. It will be a lot to ask of the Rockies front office (literally and figuratively) to, likely, invest more than half a billion dollars between three players.

That’s especially the case when…

Signing Bauer doesn’t address their biggest issues

The Rockies’ strong suit is their starting rotation and they need some major help offensively and in the bullpen. Bauer addresses neither of those, at least directly. While signing him would give the Rockies more pitching depth, as we mentioned yesterday, the Rockies would still need to make some other trades or signings and have their current players develop more.

The Rockies will not be a playoff-contending team unless players like Sam Hilliard, Ryan McMahon, Brendan Rodgers, Raimel Tapia, Scott Oberg, Jon Gray, Kyle Freeland, Dom Nunez, Yency Almonte, Josh Fuentes, Garrett Hampson, Yonathan Daza, Carlos Estevez, Tyler Kinley, and Jairo Diaz (and there are many more) either take the next step to become better players, stay healthy, and/or be more consistent on a year-in and year-out basis.

That’s, essentially, the genesis of the Rockies problems not just in the last two seasons, but throughout their franchise history. Bauer may help alleviate that but he’s one player among a roster of 26. He can’t do it alone.

That provides a segway into reason number three.

They’d still only be the third-best team in the NL, at best

Until they play differently, even with signing Bauer, the Rockies would be no better than a third-place team on paper. Do you, potentially, want to shell out $150-$200+ million for Bauer if you can’t resign Story and/or keep Arenado long term and can’t afford any other reinforcements on the trade or free-agent market for, as it currently stands, a one-game Wild Card game? The Rockies’ answer is probably no.

If Bauer ends up costing less than $200 million and the Rockies can sign him but also address their bullpen and offense in a more meaningful way than they have thus far this offseason, they will have the potential to be a better team and, perhaps, even flirt with winning the NL West title.

But a lot has to happen for that to even be discussed. As it stands, they are a fourth-place or last-place team. You can be an optimist all you want by saying that they had a weird year in 2020, had bad luck, and/or bad injuries in the last two years but all teams have to deal with it. Winning and winning in the playoffs means that you have enough depth and enough talent to overcome it. The two teams with the most talent and most depth were in the World Series in 2020. The Rockies, right now, do not. It’s not a mystery why they have been in fourth-place.

Bauer could be like the Rockies other free agent signings of pitchers

Along with the consistency issue, it’s the other problem that has plagued the Rockies throughout their franchise history: all of their big, multi-year free-agent pitcher signings have been flops.

Recently, we all know about the “super-bullpen” that never came to fruition with Mike Dunn, Jake McGee, Wade Davis, and Bryan Shaw but the Rockies have had plenty of other bad other free-agent pitchers signings in their history.

They include Denny Neagle, Darryl Kile, Mike Hampton, and Bill Swift. Bauer, like Kile, is known for his curveball, a pitch that is known to not be as effective at Coors Field. All four of them are among our rankings of the top ten worst free-agent signing by the Rockies from last offseason.

If there’s one person that could figure that issue out, it is the analytically-minded Bauer but there’s always a chance that he could down the tubes as many pitchers have. If that happened with Bauer and the Rockies, it would be a humongous burden on the team for years to come.