Colorado Rockies: The effect of and fixes for the “Coors Field hangover”

The Colorado Rockies are in a tough division, not only because they have tough teams to play, but because of the vast differences in elevation.

Let’s talk about the Colorado Rockies, the “Coors Field hangover,” and how to fix the issues between playing at altitude and sea level.

Despite some pretty good pitching, the first away series of 2021 in San Francisco was hard to watch. Despite the rhetoric surrounding Coors Field, people forget that Rockies batters are more hobbled than most at sea level. Pitches move much more than players are used to, and batted balls are hit more weakly. This does not mean that Rockies players are only good because of the park they play at (see DJ LeMahieu).

For this article, I researched just how bad the Rockies were transitioning from Coors Field to the Pacific coast stadiums. The statistics are surface level, but the results are usable enough to paint the not-so-pretty picture.

Over the past five years, the Colorado Rockies have accrued a record of 36-60 (.375 winning percentage) in series where they go immediately from Coors Field to sea level. Compare this to their overall away record of 160-195 (.451 winning percentage). If these Coors-to-sea-level-based games are removed, the record improves to 124-135 (.479 winning percentage).

We can compare this to games played at middle elevation parks (such as those in the NL and AL Central), which is an admittedly smaller sample size because of the Rockies playing in the NL West. A much better record of 28-29 (.491 winning percentage) is significantly better than that of when the team starts at sea level.

The Rockies record isn’t the only issue when they go from Coors to sea level.

Most teams are worse on the road than away, but for Rockies batters and pitchers, the story only gets worse.

First, the batters absolutely plummet on the Coors-to-sea-level games dropping to an average of 3.59 per game. Compare this to middle elevation games where the total runs jumps to 4.56 runs per game, higher than the average away game run total of 4.13 runs per game.

As stated before, it is a surprise how bad Colorado pitchers have been at sea level. Some of the most pitcher-friendly parks in the league, yet the Rockies pitchers often can’t perform at the level of their counterparts.

I know I have used very base-level stats for this, but let’s dip our toes in the analytics for a minute to help explain why. Spin rate has become an important statistic in the past few years. It dictates how and by how much a pitch moves on its way to the plate. The higher the spin rate, the more movement on the baseball, something very useful for a pitcher. I have discussed how low most of the Rockies’ pitching staff’s spin rate is before. Some people have even suggested that a lower spin rate is more effective at Coors Field, hence another reason the “Superpen experiment” failed.

The point to all of this is that the lower spin rate drastically changes pitcher effectiveness at sea level, actually hurting Rockies pitchers instead of helping. Doing some quick math, we see that, on average, the Rockies allow 4.73 runs per game. Another quick calculation shows that this is lower than Coors-to-sea-level games, which allow on average 5.06 runs per game. Compare this to going from Coors to mid-elevation games, the average runs allowed is a significantly lower 4.16 runs per game.

Now before I make some suggestions on how to fix this issue (I am sure you already have a few in mind), I want to do some housekeeping.

First, the Rockies are in a very tough division. The past few years have seen all teams in the division shine a little brighter along with the ever-bright Dodgers. A lot of these eliminated sea games have been games against the Dodgers. But any Rockies fan will tell you that the worst parks for the Rockies to play at have always been in San Francisco and Miami. I also want to point out that only 2017 seemed to break the trend I am setting when the Rockies went .500 for both Coors-to-sea and Coors-to-mid-elevation games.

Another thing that I want to point out is that I believe that the Rockies’ performance in these games is because of the trip from Coors Field. In my research, I performed game splits, looking at each game in the individual series. The pitching usually remains bad throughout the entire series, but the batting improves as the team spends time at sea level (10-23, 3.48 RF, 5.45 RA in first sea-level games). Compare this to going from middle-elevation starts and you see that batting and pitching start off well, but then both taper off as the series goes on (10-9, 4.68 RS, 3.58 RA).

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There is one important caveat to all of this. I researched what the numbers looked like for the reverse situations, when the Rockies returned home from sea and middle-elevation parks.

The results are quite interesting. The Colorado Rockies are superb when coming back from sea level to Coors Field. The pitching isn’t great, but the team has accrued a record of 61-41, 6.28 RS, and 5.15 RA in returning series from the sea. That is better than the 37-30, 5.55 RF, 5.98 RA line from the middle elevation returning series. The reason the Rockies come back stronger from lower elevations is that they have their eyes more trained on the ball and they can predict movement better. They can capitalize on the advantage of their own ballpark because they have better trained for the game at sea level. I am going to take that into account when constructing my fix for the schedule.

Schedule fix 1: The simple fix

You want to know the way to best help the Rockies? Start every away stand at a middle elevation park. This helps players acclimate on the way down from Coors and should create better offensive results once they get to sea level.

The second part of this fix is to have every homestand come after the team has been at sea level. This one is admittedly more optional and seems to skew the results in the Rockies’ favor for at least the first few games, but baseball is a game built off momentum, and winning the first few games of a certain series can have rippling effects that could change the entire season.

For MLB in general, it would be best if the Rockies both started and ended away stands at middle elevations. The Rockies would be more competitive on away stands, and Coors Field would be more competitive for visiting teams. The Rockies’ sea-based division, however, makes this part of the solution a bit harder to implement.

It also seems that, over the past five years, the schedule has tried to punish the Rockies rather than help ease the climate issue. Coors-to-mid-elevation games happen 6% less than their mid-to-Coors series counterparts, meaning the Rockies play fewer games coming up from sea level than they would if the proportions were even. This also means they play more games going down to sea level than they should if the proportion was even. Just making this proportion even would help the Rockies perform a little better.

But, hey, I like middle elevation, so let’s get drastic.

Schedule fix 2: New division, who dis?

The second solution I have devised is for the Rockies to move divisions. Unfortunately, this is something that is not as easy to do as just being conscious of the Rockies schedule, it is going to affect a lot more teams throughout the league.

First, what if we just place the Rockies into an existing division? An even swap for another team to be in the NL West?

Well, unfortunately, no teams can really meet this goal. The Rockies would have just as many sea-level opponents as they currently do if they were to just swap with someone in the AL West. While the NL/AL Central Divisions could work from a geography standpoint (Rockies are about as far from the Central teams as they are from the NL West teams), there would be no team currently in the Central Divisions that could feasibly work in the NL West.

Ok, so that doesn’t work, but here is something that could work: Completely rearranging the Western Divisions.

For this, I propose the MLB move the Rockies and Diamondbacks into the AL West, being replaced in the NL West by Oakland and Seattle. Now, this could be an issue league-wide because that would make the NL West the only division to play entirely at sea level. However, there are already two divisions in the league that are solely middle elevation teams, so I am fine with the NL West being entirely coastal.

The reason I chose Oakland and Seattle to be the ones that move over was to help preserve rivalries. The Rangers/Angels, Rangers/ Astros, and the Dodgers/Giants are traditional rivalries that I intended to keep intact.

The A’s moving to the NL West also works as they already have a built-in traditional rival in the Giants. This is perhaps the most promising case of rearranging divisions for the Rockies. With this, they have an even split of sea- and middle-elevation-based games, meaning that the schedule can be more easily worked out to help the team succeed.

Finally, MLB will expand eventually. When that happens, the league will increase to at least 32 teams. Divisions will probably mirror that of the NFL, with the number of teams in each division decreased to four.

In theory, they could make each division eight teams, but for this, we will assume four per division. People expect these teams to be one much further West than Colorado (Las Vegas, Portland, Vancouver) and further east than Missouri (Nashville, Charlotte, Montreal). Unless the league throws a curveball and puts a team in San Antonio or Oklahoma City, the Rockies scenario looks the same regardless of the MLB’s choice.