The Rockies' problem is the house that Coors built

Sporting News, The, Dec 2, 2002 by Ken Rosenthal

The Rockies are a mess. Their cleanup will take three years, minimum. And when their payroll finally is close to spotless, club officials still might not know the answer to the question that caused all their problems: How the heck do you win at Coors Field?

Never mind that the Rockies' owners lack vision. That their general manager, Dan O'Dowd, specializes in demolition. That in 10 years, the franchise has yet to finish with more than 83 wins, though it won the wild card in the strike-shortened 1995 season.

It all comes back to Coors, the Rubik's Cube of baseball. And even though the Rockies are trying to correct past mistakes, former club officials doubt the franchise ever will field a consistent contender.

"You can put together a club in a given year where everything falls into place and you win," says Bob Gebhard, the team's general manager from its inception in November 1991 until August 1999. "But it's going to be tougher to win year after year."

It's going to be especially tough now that the Rockies are reducing their payroll to a reported $51 million, down from $71 million two years ago. The cuts reflect declining revenue: Home attendance has fallen for six straight seasons, from a high of 3.89 million in 1996 to a low of 2.74 million in 2002.

No wonder the Rockies are trotting out Plan G, or maybe it's Plan H, for those still keeping score. Their new strategy bears a resemblance to Plan A, the original Blake Street Bomber blueprint. But privately, club officials concede that there is no plan, other than to escape crippling long-term contracts.

Heck, the Rockies won't even try to make sense of their revamped roster until after they finish their purge. Their goal in attempting to trade Mike Hampton, Denny Neagle and Larry Walker isn't to acquire better players. It's to regain payroll flexibility, and the process won't be complete until the Rockies' combined $54 million commitment to newly acquired center catcher Charles Johnson expires in 2005.

The Rockies are better off than they were a month ago but only in the way that a person with $150,000 of credit-card debt is better off when he reduces it to $50,000. O'Dowd entered the offseason with four players--Hampton, Neagle, Walker and Todd Helton--projected to earn 72.7 percent of the team's 2003 payroll. He has no choice but to retrench.

Patience is required--the Rockies will be a mishmash by design, virtually assured of failure. O'Dowd, entering his fourth season, is in an impossible position. His trades likely will benefit the Rockies long-term. But another disappointing season probably will cost him his job, even though he is under contract through '04.

It could be that O'Dowd is too impulsive and emotional to succeed as a general manager. Or it could be that any general manager would lose his equilibrium trying to figure out how to win at Coors, where the thin air at high altitude has produced the greatest hitters' park in major league history.

The 2002 edition of Baseball Prospectus offers several logical ideas for the Rockies, suggesting that they acquire contact hitters and strikeout pitchers while dividing part of their pitching staff into home and road specialists. But no solution is foolproof. The authors propose that the Rockies make defense less of a priority. Yet every out at Coors is critical, and three outfielders with center field-type ability are required to cover the vast outfield.

A shift toward contact hitters, meanwhile, might not be necessary. The success rate when a hitter puts the ball in play at Coors is higher than at any other park. But the strikeout rate at Coors is 14 percent less than in other parks, according to STATS Inc. figures from 1999 to 2001. A sample of seven prominent hitters acquired by the Rockies showed the same average reduction in strikeout totals, with the benefit coming almost entirely in home games. A high-strikeout slugger such as Wilson, then, figures to make greater contact at Coors.

Then there is pitching. Two types of starters succeed with the Rockies: homegrown talents such as Jason Jennings who arrive without expectations and thick-skinned veterans such as Pedro Astacio who are impervious to poor outings. "A pitcher making half his starts at that place--it really takes its toll" says Jim Leyland, the Rockies' manager in 1999. "When you're talking about a guy starting twice during a 10-day homestand, that can be disastrous."

O'Dowd-like turnover, then, isn't necessarily bad for the pitching staff. But, again, it's all subject to debate. Leyland says the Rockies need a combination of sluggers and hitters who can manufacture runs on the road. Good luck putting such a group together. It's probably best to just slug.

"You've got to be a heavyweight boxer and pound the heck out of everybody" says Brewers general manager Doug Melvin, whose former team, the Rangers, play in the A.L's best hitting park. "Bob Gebhard and I had better teams when we had very strong offensive clubs. When everyone wanted us to get more pitching, we got fired"