What if the Colorado Rockies had not traded Nolan Arenado to the St. Louis Cardinals?

I have been watching Marvel’s What If…? recently. The show has me wondering about many what if’s in my life. What if I hadn’t met my girlfriend? What if I played college football? And, most importantly, what if Nolan Arenado had played for the Colorado Rockies in 2021? How many more games would they have won? They were better than everyone expected. Could they have been a playoff team? Let’s get into it.

First, let’s get something out of the way. Everything that we are looking at today is merely speculation based on Nolan’s numbers in St. Louis. He could’ve had a completely different season with the Rockies. We cannot properly account for these unknowable. Therefore, we are just going to assume Nolan Arenado would’ve had a similar quality season to that he had for the Cards if he was still on the Rockies.

What would have Nolan Arenado’s WAR looked like if he still was with the Colorado Rockies?

Nolan Arenado produced 4.2 WAR in the 2021 season for the St. Louis Cardinals. The most simple answer to determine how much WAR would have been gained if Arenado wore a Colorado Rockies uniform.

If Nolan was on the team, then immediately, you know several call ups with net negative WAR would never have happened, think players like Rio Ruiz and Matt Adams. Brendan Rodgers would see less time, and unfortunately, I doubt we would see the emergence of Connor Joe.

When those factors are considered, the 2021 Colorado Rockies would have gained about 4.0 WAR. This would equate to the Rockies finishing with a 78-84 record to end one game behind the San Diego Padres to remain in 4th place in the NL West.

For those curious, St. Louis could have lost as much as 5.0 net WAR without Nolan on their roster, finishing with an 85-77 record and still beating out the Reds by two games for the second NL Wild Card Spot.

WAR gives a good idea of a player’s impact, but I believe we can do better, let’s look at how Nolan would have affected the Run Differential.

Nolan Arenado was good on defense in 2021 but not as good as he was with the Colorado Rockies

So determining how many runs having Nolan would have saved if he was with the Colorado Rockies, we yet again look at the individual players on the rosters and determine the gained DRS for the team.

Unfortunately, Nolan’s defense suffered (by his standards) in 2021, with a fielding percentage of .974 and a DRS of 6.

It’s difficult to consider how he would have done in Colorado defensively because fielding is just different at Coors. Pitchers rely heavily on ground balls rather than strikeouts, giving Nolan more opportunities to perform.

Because of this, I am reluctantly choosing to port his numbers from 2016, when he had an almost identical Fielding percentage with a DRS of 13. The way the math works out is that the Colorado Rockies would have had roughly 11 more DRS if Nolan Arenado was the man starting at 3rd Base.

So what does this all mean? Does each run equate to a win?

Do the Rockies win 49 more games? No, of course not. That’s not how baseball works. The best way to see how this roster shift would work is by taking the Pythagorean Win-Loss from the new runs for and against.

For those uninitiated, the Pythagorean Win-Loss formula that Baseball-Reference uses works as such:

(Runs for)^1.83 / ( (Runs For)^1.83 + (Runs Against)^1.83 )

What would the Colorado Rockies have looked like with Nolan Arenado on the team in 2021?

With our calculated runs, we can estimate that the Rockies would have ended the season with 777 Runs For and 785 Runs Against for a record of between 80-82 and 81-81, a seven-game swing from where they ended the season.

The Colorado Rockies would remain out of the playoff picture but would have been only two games back from the Reds and nine games back from the Cardinals if they could have a similar season without Nolan, which I find unlikely, but it is still possible that they remain in the second NL Wild Card spot with a significantly worse record.

If we assume similar swings in loss of runs and DRS for the Cardinals, they would have ended the season with 668 Runs For and 678 Runs Against.

This would give the Cardinals a final Pythagorean Win-Loss between 79-83 and 80-82, worse than what the Rockies would have had if they kept Nolan. This means Cincinnati would have likely won the second WC spot and played the Dodgers in the Wild Card game.

It should be noted that St Louis’ Pythagorean Win-Loss WITH Arenado was actually 5 games lower than what their final record was. This just means that they won close games but get blown out when they lost. With that in mind, for our final analysis, let’s look at close games the Rockies lost and determine their maximum record if Nolan had remained with the team.

So, what we are going to do is first assume the Rockies score one more run in each game that they lost in extras, score two more runs in games they lost by 1, score three in games they lost by 2 runs, and so on until we have added the calculated 49 net runs for the Rockies.

The Colorado Rockies had 14 games go to extras this year and they lost half of them (7-7 record). The Rockies also lost 25 games by one run this season, we can apply all the remaining 42 runs here to give the Colorado Rockies an extra 21 wins.

If this very unlikely scenario were to happen, the Rockies would’ve won 28 more games for a final record of 102-60. That’s right. If by some miracle, Nolan Arenado stayed with the Colorado Rockies and produced similar to what he did in St. Louis, then the Colorado Rockies ceiling would have been its first 100+ win season.

And, even then, they would’ve still likely finished 3rd in the NL West behind the Dodgers and Giants. However, depending on which specific one-run games they win, they could’ve ended up at most 2 games ahead of the Dodgers and still remained three games behind the Giants for the division.

Even with stretches in fantasyland, the Colorado Rockies cannot win an NL West Division Crown.

Conclusion

While it is fun to imagine the Colorado Rockies being contenders this season, it was never going to happen.

Even with Nolan, this team isn’t ready to compete, despite what some might claim. After all, in 2019, the Rockies had a healthy Arenado and a healthy Trevor Story … and they went 71-91.

Nolan got the playoffs with the Cardinals. He had fun, something that he was definitively not having last year with the Rockies. His performance, in all likelihood, would’ve been worse if he stayed in Colorado if he was still not having fun.

A player’s mentality is a lot in a sport like baseball. If Nolan stayed, the 102-60 ceiling would have been extremely high, but the likely outcome would have had them finish right in the middle, with bad draft picks and missing playoffs, right at 81-81.

Baseball is a team sport, one player can’t save a season. If they could, Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani would be in the playoffs right now. Rockies fans miss you, Nolan. We hope you are finally happy.

While you make the playoffs and the Colorado Rockies season ends, we sit here wondering … What if?