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.

With run differential, how much of an impact would Nolan Arenado have had on the Colorado Rockies?

Now for the Run Differential question, we aren’t comparing Nolan to individual players, but his spot in the lineup.

What do I mean by that?

Well, Nolan batted 3rd for the Rockies, and we can assume he would have continued to do so if he remained on the team. The reason this is important is that, unless you hit a home run, other batters are mostly responsible for your runs.

Hence, why we are going to look at how many runs the 3rd lineup spot had for the Rockies this year.

Assuming Nolan could get on base at around the same amount of times as Charlie Blackmon, how many more times would he come around?

Using this raw math, Nolan would have touched home base at least eight more times than the 3rd batter did for the Rockies in 2021. Only 8? That can’t be right, can it?

Well, you’re kinda right, an important part of modern baseball is park-adjusted stats.

When half your games are at Coors Field, as much as the “Coors” effect is overblown, there is still a slight offensive boost gained by playing in the ballpark.

This is actually the opposite in St Louis, as Busch Stadium is actually a pitcher-friendly ballpark.

So, when considering what Arenado’s numbers would have looked like, we first adjust his numbers to neutralize them and then adjust them again to playing in a Coors environment. The full formula to adjust numbers from Busch Stadium to Coors Field goes as such,

• (Stat / 2) + (Stat / (.92 * 2)) = neutralized stat

and then

• (Stat / 2) + (neutralized stat * 1.12 / 2) = Coors Stat

With that in mind, we must finally consider the roughly 49 PA (Plate Appearances) that Nolan would have been resting for. To calculate this we just scale how the 3rd lineup spot for the Rockies did this season from 702 PA to 49 PA.

With all that considered, we would see the Rockies lineup score about 110 runs, 12 more than they could produce in 2021.

Simply touching the bag, though, is not the only way a player produces runs. They can also help other players score. RBIs are king in baseball, and how other players can score is often much more important than how many you can score yourself.

Using similar calculations to before, we can see that the 3rd lineup spot (almost entirely Nolan) would have created about 124 RBIs, which is 26 more than the Colorado Rockies had in the 2021 campaign. We can logically assume then that simply keeping Nolan Arenado on the roster would have created around 38 extra runs for the Rockies offense.

But offense isn’t all that matters, is it?

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?