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

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.