Colorado Rockies: Five takeaways from Bill Schmidt’s Ryan McMahon/shortstop comments

5) The Colorado Rockies could be more in on the third base market

If the Rockies are thinking of moving McMahon to shortstop, he won’t be playing third base.

The Rockies could turn to players like Colton Welker or even top prospect Elehuris Montero but the Rockies have questions about both of them at third base. And even if they don’t have issues, they probably won’t be as good as McMahon was defensively.

That means that the Rockies could be bigger players in the third base market than the shortstop market.

The third base free agent options don’t have as sexy of names out there but they could be the stop gap that the Rockies would likely want. They include Kyle Seager, Eduardo Escobar, and Travis Shaw. Kris Bryant is the top free agent third baseman on the market but, again, the Rockies won’t spend that much money to get him.

Recently, we talked about how the Rockies could go to the trade market for a third baseman and that third baseman would be Oakland’s Matt Chapman. We discussed the possibility that if the Rockies acquired Chapman, Rodgers would play short and McMahon would play second but maybe those two would flip instead.

We also discussed the case for and against Seager in this article this past weekend.

Throughout the offseason, obviously, things could and will change. Perhaps, shortstop could be a position that Ryan McMahon could add to his repertoire, and maybe he won’t play shortstop at all. But if he becomes the everyday shortstop for the Rockies, that would be something that would have been a surprise to a lot of people just a few short weeks ago.