The Colorado Rockies are hot, but don’t fall for this Fool’s Gold quite yet

Needless to say, the backlash from the Colorado Rockies’ inaction at the July 30 trade deadline came ruthlessly from all directions. The front office chose to believe in the Rockies’ young rotation with the belief that they can stymie up this lineup in the offseason and build a contender from there.

After all, a consistent thought with them throughout the past couple of middling seasons has been that the lineup is good. They just need to play better.

That thought process was, to put it lightly, not viewed very favorably by an overwhelming amount of the baseball world.

But now, we are seeing the version of the Colorado Rockies that the front office hoped for

Since the trade deadline came and went, they are definitely seeing the version of the Rockies they’ve been envisioning as they’ve gone 7-2 coming into Tuesday’s series opener in Houston.

As of Tuesday, no team has scored more runs (70) or hit more home runs (25) since the trade deadline. In fact, their position players have the highest fWAR (4.3) and wRC+ (158) since the trade deadline. The pitching staff, meanwhile, has the third-highest fWAR in the same timeframe (2.1). All combined, no team has been better than the Rockies since the deadline.

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Obviously, this is an extremely small sample size but it’s still insane to see that the Colorado Rockies, in any length of time, lead the league in fWAR with a wRC+ of 158. The highest wRC+ for any Rockies team, for a frame of reference, was 97 in 2014.

Now it’s completely unrealistic to expect them to hit this well for an entire season and the level of competition hasn’t exactly been stellar over this span. But the Rockies being this dominant begs these questions: Does this only help reinforce the front office’s belief that the Rockies can be a competitive club if they just simply play better? And is that actually a good thing for this franchise going forward?

For starters, the Rockies only have $18.3M committed to this roster for the 2022 season and $7M of that is slated for Scott Oberg (whose baseball future is, unfortunately, in doubt). A host of Rockies are going to have their salaries determined through arbitration, and Charlie Blackmon has a $21M player option for next season, but this paints a picture that the Rockies will have a ton of money to play with but with next to zero guarantees on key players returning.

Trevor Story is all but gone. Jon Gray says he wants to stay, but that doesn’t mean someone hungrier on the market won’t snatch him away. C.J. Cron could be enticing to a large amount of AL teams who need a DH. It’s very realistic that none of them return to the Rockies and that would amount to essentially 25% of the Rockies total production (by fWAR for this season) leaving them. That is a HUGE detriment to a team that’s still 20 games back of the NL West lead and 12.5 games back of a Wild Card spot with no guarantee any big-name bats would want to come here.

So if the plan is still to go after big-name bats, there certainly will be options. But there is no guarantee any big name will want to play in Colorado after watching them destroy relationships with the franchise’s better players seemingly year after year:

• Ubaldo Jimenez
• Troy Tulowitzki
• Nolan Arenado
• Trevor Story