The Rockies return for their home opener having lost their first series of the season, and until that goose egg in the title to this post becomes a number larger than the one preceding it, we can expect at least a few normally level heads to grow pessimistic. It's just the nature of forecasting: in the absence of sunlight, many will expect unceasing thunderstorms.
So,
This is the kind of baseball that got Clint Hurdle fired.
Troy Renck declares to start his recap of yesterday's five to four loss to the Brewers, which in a grand sense, the sense that losing baseball is the kind of baseball that will get any manager fired, is true, but in reality what got Clint Hurdle fired was a slow process that saw him lose the respect of his players and finally lose the support of the front office. It wasn't the failure to hit with RISP, it wasn't shoddy defense, it was a lack of control, a lack of leadership that got Hurdle fired.
The Rockies have gotten to the point that they are by taking a long view in almost all phases of the game, so while some fans and pundits start fretting that more April showers are imminent, the team itself doesn't seem inclined to panic just because it's getting it's head a little wet right now. This means no dumping Randy Flores, no panic buy of Jarrod Washburn, not even getting ahead of themselves with Ian Stewart's hot start. Everything is what it is right now: a single road series loss is in the books where the Rockies were outscored by a grand total of one run over three games to a pretty decent team, with over 50 series left to play.
Other links:
MLB.com has a video interview with GM Dan O'Dowd. O'Dowd discusses the 2010 team.
Marc Hulet at FanGraphs compares the Rockies and Rays homegrown qualities. Of course, in the comments, everybody else wants to prove that their favorite teams are just as good at it. The real way that Tampa and Colorado stand out in this regard is that they rely internally for the bulk of their wins over replacement, whereas most of those other teams (excluding the Twins, who really are similar) use most of their internally developed players as bench supplements to some heavy lifting external acquisitions.