More photos » by Ben Margot - AP

The schedule seems to indicate that Tim Lincecum and the Giants are about to put their stompin' shoes on, but they might want to check that there isn't a pesky rock in there first.

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Glad you asked. You've done so much to get this far, I'm very proud of you. Yet you sense that something's not quite complete in your life. Something's still missing. You've beaten good teams, you've gotten through some tough times, and here you sit halfway through the season and are left thinking, "Is this it?"

No. This is not it. You're an idiot for even thinking that. Look at the schedule, moron, there's still 81 games left. Get off your lazy introspective behind and start winning some more.

Okay, of course the Rockies have to get one more of those wins today against one of the two best pitchers in the National League to get back to that five over .500 level, but from there, the major point is not to get in a rut that says "just staying over .500 is fine and we'll win in September." While this has been pretty much the M.O. for National League teams the last five years, the Dodgers are pushing that envelope forward this season, and other teams in the league would be wise to start seeing that the bar for competition is getting raised. Ten over by the start of August should be the Rockies and other contending team's goal, after the jump I'll take a look at what the remaining schedule looks like for the teams that aren't already there (the Dodgers) or have little chance to get there (the Pirates, Padres, D-backs and Nationals).

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More photos » by Jeff Chiu - AP

Ian Stewart had a great July last year and projects to be one of the NL's better third basemen down the stretch in 2009, can he repeat the stellar month and this time help lead the Rockies to another playoff berth?

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First, some "on this date..." sort of history. The following links are how the major leagues have looked through games on June 27 in each of the last five seasons. The great thing about Baseball Reference's pages is that it includes the team's records after that date as well, so we can look at what makes the playoff teams tick, and why the also-rans prove pretenders. 

June 27, 2004

I want to take a close look at the AL Central in this season, as I think this shows where WolfMarauder was coming from in a discussion we had in last night's game thread. Whereas I was saying a team's performance in the first half is usually helpful in predicting the second half, this is a classic example of how that's not always the case. Minnesota, much like the Giants this season, had a start where their solid record seemed to indicate they were playing over their heads. If everything was completely predictable, we'd have expected them to come back to the pack in the second half. Instead they went 51-37, and it turned out that the won/loss record itself was more predictive of what that team was capable of than the runs scored/allowed were. In the NL, the Brewers were 41-34 after sweeping the Rockies at Coors Field to close out June, just 3.5 games back. By the trade deadline at the end of July, they were 50-53 and 16 games behind. The next few weeks will see some teams slip rapidly out of the chase.

June 27, 2005

Huston Street and the A's had actually started their great run of the summer of 2005 right about the time the Rockies started their run this year. On the morning of May 30, Oakland was 17-32, 12.5 games out of first. By June 27, they were 35-40, having gone 18-8 and just sweeping the Giants with a 16-0 slaughter. By the end of the season, they were 88-74, having gone 70-42 over their last 112 games. They wound up seven back after briefly tying for the division lead on September 15th and tiring out down the stretch run. 

June 27, 2006

Look at how the Rockies tanked for the rest of this season after being in a pretty good spot in the first half. The reason was losing 11 out of 12 just before and after the All-Star break where the team went 0-9 in games decided by two runs or less. One bad stretch was all it took to derail everything in what could/should have been the team's first successful season of a longer run, but instead the team proved to be the pretenders that most outside pundits had suspected at this point in the year. They made one more dash to within a couple of games of the NL West lead, but similarly to last night's game for the A's, it was an empty threat.

June 27, 2007

Of course, this was the complete opposite of 2006, where the Rockies were able to stay close long enough to put together the one outstanding run which proved them playoff worthy. But look closely at what happened to Milwaukee this season. On this date the team had a 7.5 game lead in the Central but went on a 3-7 road trip leading into the All-Star break, with their lead already whittled down to 4.5 games. By the time they got swept at St. Louis at the end of July, the Brewers lead had been cut down to one game. Of course they could only play spoiler for the Padres the last weekend of the season. I'm not saying anything, but how many games are the Dodgers ahead of the Rockies right now?

June 27, 2008

Don't tell Mets fans this, but their team didn't actually choke at the end of the season in 2008, they choked in the beginning. A .602 winning percentage in the last three months of the year would have been more than enough had the team gotten off to a start better than 31-34. They're slightly better than that right now in 2009, but looking at the very real threat of getting sifted out of a viable position to rally in the next few weeks due to injury. The lesson at the end of this 2008 season for the Mets and the aforementioned 2005 A's team might be of some concern to the Rockies, though. Sometimes a team can work so hard to catch up to a frontrunner that they "forget" to close out the deal. The 2007 Rockies team didn't have time for this to happen because they caught up on the last day possible, should the Rockies catch the Dodgers somehow this season, they've got to be careful to avoid the let-up in intensity that some teams seem to face.

So let's take a look at right now (well, through yesterday's games at BB-Ref):

June 27, 2009

What we know will happen:

Some teams will fade, some will surge going forward.

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Purple Row opened its doors on 28 April 2005, the season in which the Rockies lost 95 games. The losses alone could have turned someone off from blogging about the team, but Rox Girl persisted throughout the rest of the season (the offseason was a different story). Then in 2006, the monster grew a bit larger as I moved from the community to being one of the head bloggers here. Rox Girl and I continued to build Purple Row. On 1 June 2006, Rockies assistant GM/VP baseball operations Bill Geivett posted a diary here (FanPosts took the place of diaries when we transitioned to the SBN 2.0 platform in March 2008). We were still a small community, but there was proof that the Rockies organization knew about us and thought us to be credible.

2007 came, which led to those 21 days. Those 21 days that we'll always remember. The Rockies looked as if they were no longer fighting for defeat. The fans were waiting for this moment for so long. Then the Rockies fell flat on their faces against the Red Sox. In 2008 the Rockies returned to the same failed state that had persisted for years. The Rockies remain there this season.

No, we're not going to have another Rocktober in that way, but the promise of Rocktober that the Rockies had finally turned a corner is still broken. One step to rebuilding that promise is #6 in Rox Girl's manifesto: community outreach. I made a comment about how the organization could do that, and I want to expand on that here.

Bill Geivett's appearance here almost three years ago was fleeting. Maybe that's because the Rockies are afraid of, or, more likely, don't understand the evolving media. Oh, there are teams and leagues that do treat blogs differently. Athletics Nation, SBN's flagship blog, has interviewed Billy Beane, Lewis Wolff, and a few others that don't come to mind right now. AZ Snakepit, our friendly rival, has interviewed Josh Byrnes. Did you know that the NFL credentialed two of our football bloggers to be at the NFL Draft? And look at the front page of the NHL.com website. Did you catch it? They actually link to an SBN hockey website when appropriate.

Remember back in February when we were wondering who Joe Gorshe was? Through certain channels I eventually wound up asking for an interview with the guy and was basically told it wouldn't be a good idea. You know, Purple Row is a blog and all. Yep, can't do an interview with someone who we will most likely never hear about again. Just because we're a blog.

We're just a blog? We don't have any big entity behind us? SB Nation isn't big enough yet? Well, hey, look at the bottom of the page. We are an official partner with Yahoo! Sports. Doesn't that give us some legitimacy? It gives Tim Brown some legitimacy, I guess. Even with something like this. (Yes, yes, I know Tim Brown has a couple decades of work behind him, but still.)

We're not out here to make friends, but we're certainly not trying to be the enemy. We are just fans who want honest answers. Obfuscation might work with others, but it doesn't lead to honest answers.

Here it is: The Rockies organization knows about this site and reads it. But if the organization wants to build a better relationship with its fans, reach out to them in 21st-century ways. Bill Geivett's entry here was a move in the right step, but that was three years ago. Others should come here and post. Oh, I don't mean that they should stick around and just make comments here and there. But why not create a FanPost here to speak directly to the fans, answer their questions? Members won't take you seriously or believe that you are who you claim to be? E-mail Rox Girl or I so we can help smooth things out. Or let us interview you. I'm sure RockiesMagicNumber would love to meet Dan O'Dowd in person and interview him. You have nothing to fear from us, unless you fear being asked honest questions that seek honest answers. Again, we are not your enemy.

It has been 572 days since the promise of Rocktober has gone unfulfilled, and all it takes is a minute to start rebuilding that promise in a small way.

More photos » by David Zalubowski - AP

Dick Monfort and his brother must take charge here, and soon.

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John of Gaunt: What is six winters? they are quickly gone.
Bolingbroke: To men in joy; but grief makes one hour ten.

Richard II, Act 1, scene

Let me define what a core to me in baseball is: A group of six or more players in the same age range which are the driving nucleus of a ballclub. That driving nucleus is a key ingredient. With the Phillies, you can look to the Howard/Utley/Rollins nucleus as the central core that keeps the other role players valuable. I think that successful teams require some sort of central core from which they derive their strength.

The word "core" has some mysterious etymology, coming into the English language probably in the late 13th century in the trilingual Anglo-Norman period when many words from both French and Latin were incorporated. It's unknown whether it originally derived from the Old French coeur, meaning heart, or the Latin corpus (and the Old French, cors), meaning body. There is evidence that while at first the "body" definition was the primary use, it either gradually became more associated with the term for "heart", or was reintroduced that way, which is where it is at today, although the introduction of nuclear physics has expanded that use to include central reactors and important parts of bombs.

I think this is pertinent to the Rockies. Right now, they have a corpus (and a Corpas), but no coeur. The Rockies Gen R group still meets the six player threshold of a baseball core, but while it may have once been living with Matt Holliday, it's now a dead core, one that no longer has sufficient talent and/or leadership to drive the team to victory on a regular basis.

A central premise of where I'm going to go from here: ONCE A CORE IS DEAD, IT DOES NOT REVIVE WITHOUT AN EXTERNAL CATALYST. Two cores could be functioning on a team at once. The 2008 Dodgers eventually succeeded with a dual core, one 23-26 year old group including Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier, and one 31-35 year old group that included Derek Lowe, Nomar Garciaparra, Chan Ho Park and Takashi Saito. Neither core was functioning for the first half of that season. Manny Ramirez, while clearly in the age range of the older core, provided a catalyst to both groups in leading them to the playoffs.

In 2009, their young core has started to consume the older group and are using Ramirez and Orlando Hudson as super-support, but the Dodgers remain viable because their team has a living, functioning heart. Personally, I think the leaders on that team are Chad Billingsley and Russell Martin right now, and they will continue to do just fine without Ramirez. With the Rockies Gen R group, a few of the players are performing decently, a couple very well, but it's an insufficient, inferior group of players on the whole.

Where is the Heart?

So if the heart is no longer in the 28-30 year old group for the Rockies, where is it, and what can be done to make it strong enough to compete for the playoffs? The next group down, the 25 to 27-year old players, includes Ubaldo Jimenez, Chris Iannetta, Seth Smith and a handful of key relievers and is actually where most of the team's win value is coming from on the young 2009 season, but it seems to be an inner core without a sufficient outer core to go around it, leaving it about as useless as the 28-30 year old group when it comes to leading this team to a winning record. Perhaps because the team was built this way, the body of the older players and the manager do not seem keen on letting themselves be led by this group.

The organization's 22-24 year old group, on the other hand, seems to be rich with players that could lead an inner core and surround it as an outer body. Troy Tulowitzki, Dexter Fowler, Ian Stewart and Carlos Gonzalez are all potential impact players. The Rockies AA Tulsa rotation is full of quality potential MLB level starters in and near the same age range, and the upper system is littered with other players in this age group that can fill around whatever emerges as the central life force. The big problem with this group right now is that it lacks experience, it simply is unready to emerge as the lead force on a contending team, particularly one that's insistent that there's life left in the body currently laying on top of it.

Since the Matt Holliday trade, which moved in the right direction by shifting players into the two groups more likely to be the lifeblood of the next successful Rockies franchise, management both on the field and off seems to still be trying to build this team around the idea that the Cook/Hawpe/Atkins Gen R group is still a playoff caliber core. In acquiring Jason Marquis, Matt Belisle and Matt Murton, whether the moves were wise and valuable or not, the team took on additions that left that Gen R group as the focus to the detraction of players like Seth Smith and Matt Daley. Sadly, adding arms and legs and fingers and toes to a dead body is not going to bring it back to life.

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More photos » by Ed Andrieski - AP

Todd Helton's back and looking great.

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Opening Day is Christmas in April. During spring training we receive hints at what we may or may not receive from our guys. Then that day in April comes when the umpire yells "Play!" and the games start to count again. We start to find out what gifts our team has for us this year. Some are great (the return of Todd Helton, first Opening Day), some are unexpected, and others many of us would prefer to exchange for something else. But in the end, we've all experienced something, no matter the outcome, truly wonderful: the collective feeling of being with our team through it all.

Abraham Lincoln was on the right track with the closing remarks in his first Inaugural Address, but I'll change some stuff around:

[...] We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from [fans in SoCal to New York to England to Korea], will yet swell the chorus of [Rockies Nation], when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

As I mentioned in a comment last night, I'll make a prediction on how the Rockies fare this season. They'll take the NL West with 85 wins. To borrow from Lincoln's second Inaugural Address:

With malice toward none, with charity for all [...], let [the Rockies] strive on to finish the work [of Rocktober, to prove that they should not be written off, to create the legends and myths for those fans who will come long after this season is gone, and] to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all [prognosticators].

Rockies baseball is back!

Rox Girl has used wOBA (weighted On-base Average) in some of her recents pieces. For those that don't know what wOBA is, it is, as FanGraphs informs us, "a solid, context-neutral statistic that values hitting properly." FanGraphs has also recently added wRAA to its pages. It stands for weighted Runs Above Average, and this article can tell you a bit about how it is calculated. I'll just say here that it is derived in part from wOBA, a reason I mention that stat. 

FanGraphs has these two stats for every season since 1974, though I'm only concerned with the last two seasons.

The second column, wRAA2, is FanGraph's "Batting" in their Value section and is adjusted for park factors. When adjusting for park factors, Garrett Atkins really suffers, as he goes from a wRAA of 5 to almost -3. Ian Stewart basically made the same contribution as Atkins did without park factors involved and was a net positive when park factors were included. Jeff Baker and Clint Barmes suffered similar fates as Atkins, but, as you most likely noticed, every player listed (and not) became a victim with the inclusion of park factors.

Matt Holliday's 46 wRAA was the fourth best in the NL and his wRAA2 moved him down to seventh. Ryan Ludwick came in just ahead of Holliday in the last category at 41.2. We'll return to Matt Holliday in a little bit with the 2007 table.

Willy Taveras--uh, yeah, that' self-explanatory. And Jimenez is on there if you want a chuckle.

Join me after the jump to see the 2007 table.

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Okay, so while my BTB Community WAR project post kicked off a solid discussion about how much projected playing time we could count on from Garrett Atkins and Ryan Spilborghs, some of the other possible points of discussion were left in the dust. Lesson to me: compartmentalize. So I'm going to separate out some of the other bullet points so we can give them the consideration they deserve, starting with what appears to me the one CHONE projection which seems overly negative. The one that projects Aaron Cook to allow 5.09 runs per game (4.7 earned), more than he has since his second season in the big leagues in 2003.

Aaron Cook

#28 / Pitcher / Colorado Rockies

Height: 6-3

Weight: 215

Bats: R

Throws: R

Born: Feb 08, 1979

There could be reason to suspect a fall back from Cook, among them a second half in 2008 that showed him to be exactly the kind of pitcher that CHONE projects:

What was odd about the second half spike is that while one aspect of run prevention, Cook's HR rate, improved considerably (12 HR's given up in the first half, one in the second) his strikeout rate took a dip from 11.8% to 9.1%. Think about what that meant in the bigger picture: fewer hits off of contact were leaving the ballpark with the dipping HR rate, while at the same time more balls were being put into play with the dipping K rate. Cook was shifting into a more defensive dependent mode of pitching, and at first glance, his defense seems to have let him down.

However, that's not the complete story, closer scrutiny of Cook's batted ball data in the second half reveals one glaring reason why hitters would suddenly find it much easier to get base hits off of him:

The average line drive rate for the National League last season was just barely over 19%. Cook for his career has averaged 19.4%. For three of the last four months of the season, Cook was well over what we would expect from a major league pitcher. The question we have to ask in projecting him for next season is why. Was it simply bad luck? Was it just a matter of fatigue? His fastball velocity wouldn't indicate this, as he was actually throwing harder in August and September than he was in April and May. Or is there something far more troubling afoot here that would indicate a problem that will carry over  into 2009?

I want to hear what the Purple Row community thinks about what we could expect from Aaron in 2009. For a reference point, his 2009 projections from CHONE, Bill James and Marcel each predict him to go 182 innings. CHONE apparently proects the trouble with his line drive rate to continue, as it gives him a BABIP of .325 versus .307 and .303 for the other two. CHONE, as I mentioned in the first paragraph sees his ERA at that 4.70 mark, while James says 4.34, and Marcel 4.10.

via media.rockymountainnews.com

Who's more correct here?

Troy Renck makes another one of those statements that really means nothing, this time in regard to Jason Marquis' acquisition:

He’s a winner, having gone to the playoffs every season of his career.

Now, let's make this clear. From the year Jason Marquis started his career (2000 with the Braves) to this past season (2008 with the Cubs), the team he has been on has made the playoffs. But I'm not sure how that makes him a winner. You can say he is a winner because his career record stands at 79-70, but because he's made the playoffs every season?

And if he was such a winner, I'd expect him to, you know, pitch in the playoffs. As a rookie in 2000, he didn't make it. I won't fault him for that, pitching in only 15 games that season. He pitched two innings of relief over two games during the 2001 NLCS. He was left off the Braves' roster for the next two postseasons before moving to St. Louis. He saw action in the 2004 and 2005 postseasons for the Cardinals, and he even made the 2006 postseason roster for the NLDS, somehow, but did not pitch. But he didn't make the NLCS and WS rosters (let's remember that 2006 was really bad for Marquis). Moving to the Cubs in 2007, Lou Piniella went with a three-man rotation in the playoffs, leaving Marquis out of the rotation. And lest we forget, Marquis pitched the ninth inning of the first game in the 2008 NLDS against the Dodgers.

So, let's be clear. Jason Marquis is a winner in the sense that he has a winning record. But he is not a winner because he went to the playoffs every season. It's simply not true. Even if he did go to the postseason every season, there's a reason why over the last few seasons his managers didn't want to use him.