The Colorado Rockies should use 7 starting pitchers. That’s right. 7

How would the Colorado Rockies make this work?

It’s simple to put this squad together. Look at the potential starting rotation for the Colorado Rockies and choose the 2-3 pitchers with the most even home/away splits (unless they are generally bad). This will act as your core rotation. They are the pitchers who will almost always pitch in their spot in the rotation no matter where the Rockies play.

After you have your core rotation set, look to round out your rotation for Coors Field. These are your high groundball percentage, low fastball spin rate pitchers that aren’t really built for much outside of Coors Field pitching. I’ve talked extensively about what makes pitchers work at Coors in my previous pitching articles. Keeping that ball out of the massive outfield is the absolute priority. We know what to look for at this point but if you don’t, this article by Rox Pile’s Tyler Paddor examines it in depth.

Boom. Home rotation is set, but they are only effective at Coors Field, so who should make up the road warriors? Easy, do what works everywhere not in Denver, something that Dick Monfort has tried and failed at for a very long time. High strikeout, high spin rate. Think pitchers like Wade Davis and Bryan Shaw before they were on the Rockies.

But I’m sure you are wondering, if there are more starting pitchers, there must be fewer relievers, right? Well yes, but your off-series starters can be used as bullpen arms as needed. They are getting large amounts of rest, anyway. The days of the long reliever for the Colorado Rockies would be over.

It also provides easy opportunities for spot starts and through schedule manipulation (because you have so many starters on the roster) no pitcher would have to pitch on short rest. The facsimile of a five-man rotation would still exist, but seven pitchers would carry that role, four of them simply would swap places every Home/Away stand.

So who should be in the Rockies 7-man rotation?

Let’s build us the ultimate super-rotation for the Colorado Rockies out of players they’ve had the past several years. First, we start with the core, the players always in the rotation no matter where the team plays: Jon Gray, Kyle Freeland, and Germán Márquez. These guys were the trifecta for the team for the last several years. Each had their trials, but they all showed flashes of greatness. Home and away, they can be your guys/would have been your guys.

Next, let’s set up the hometown pitchers, the guys that are fantastic at Coors and that’s about it. These guys would start for the home stands and work in relief during the away stretches.

Looking at the splits over the last five years, it’s simple: Chad Kuhl, and Antonio Senzatela/Austin Gomber. Chad Kuhl has been one of the best pitchers at Coors Field in the past five years and would actually work decently as an away relief pitcher. I like Gomber’s stats overall better than Senzatela, but Gomber has struggled home and away all year.

They both have the stuff for Coors Field, but not like the Kuhl cat himself. You may notice that with these three choices, we have the current rotation already set to continue pitching for the team, and you are completely correct. The starting pitching staff is built for Coors currently, but that is about it. These pitchers have struggled when away from the Mile High City, so who can take the reins elsewhere?

The Rockies rotation on the road

Let’s set up away pitching. The ones that could start at Dodger Stadium, but only be a desperate relief at Coors Field.

For this, we have a solid choice in Chad Bettis and a surprising choice in Tim Melville. Tim Melville allowed only four earned runs and a single home run in the three games he started on the road for the Colorado Rockies in 2019.

Honestly, he is one of the few Rockies pitchers to pitch super well on the road while being absolutely atrocious at home (with .519 OPS and a .213 BABIP, lowest among all Rockies starting pitching the last 5 years on the road, but that OPS jumps to second worst when you look at home). But I would still seek to swap him out with someone else in free agency because sustainability would be in question.

Chad Bettis had a very similar home/away split to Melville but with a significantly larger sample size. Both pitchers seem built for Coors Field (low spin, high groundball rate), just never seemed to put it together at home, but really performed when on the road.

With that, the ideal Colorado Rockies starting rotation would be: Jon Gray, Germán Márquez, Kyle Freeland, Chad Kuhl (home), Antonio Senzatela (home), Chad Bettis (Away), and Tim Melville (away).

Conclusion

Yes, I think this 7-man rotation is something that the Colorado Rockies can do extremely effectively. It may seem crazy, but I think they could actually achieve the super-rotation that we have heard about for so long by doing this.

By leaning into the splits so hard, the Colorado Rockies could actually become a much better baseball team, even with pitchers that they have had over the past five seasons. They may not be the most analytically minded team, but doing something like this would be extremely forward-thinking on their part. It all just depends on if they want to listen to the data.

Colorado Rockies: It’s time to let some players go

If there is any hope of this team being competitive any time soon, the Colorado Rockies need to stop thinking about the present and focus on the future.