The Rockies will always be losers

The Rockies will always be losers. Not only that, but they have always been losers. On April 5, 1993, the Rockies played their first game, and they lost their first game. Their 0-1 record placed them below the .500 mark they were gifted upon establishment. And under .500 they have stayed. Never in Rockies history has the team had a historical record above .500. It’s never happened, and it never will.

The Rockies have won 1,758 games in their 24 seasons; the Rockies have lost 2,042 games in their 24 seasons. The Rockies are 258 games below .500. The Rockies would need to win, on average, 90 games a season for the next 16 seasons in order to climb above .500 in their history. The Rockies are losers. Losers!

One example of how loserish the Rockies are came during the calendar year 2012. That year, the Rockies lost 98 games. That’s almost 100! A round number that is not insignificant. That was the most times the loser Rockies have lost during a single year of losing. Every time a baseball team has lost that many times in a season, that team was a loser. Every. Time.

It’s true that this loserly trend of losing is sometimes disrupted by the opposite of losing, as happened in the year 2009, when the Rockies didn’t lose 92 of the 162 games they played. Sure, that number might be impressive when compared to other baseball teams in a similar time frame. However, it pales in comparison to the number of Skittles that is likely to be found in a 14 ounce bag of Skittles. That figure clocks in at 225—more than double 92.

Not only that, but the Rockies also lost 70 games that year. In other words, the gap between how many games the Rockies lost and didn’t lose in 2009 was much, much smaller than the distance between how many games they didn’t lose and the number of Skittles in an average 14 ounce bag of Skittles. But what else do you expect from losers?

Keith Law gets it. The Rockies are “going to have a hard time seeing the playoffs next year,” he wrote. And it’s not just because the playoffs aren’t an object to be seen but an event to be experienced; rather, it’s because the Rockies are big fat losers. Thus, they should trade Nolan Arenado, as long as all the losing isn’t weighing him down. That’s just one person’s opinion, but it’s not like it was formed out of nothing and without much thought or effort put toward the declaration. It surely emerged from the self-evident and historically proven fact that the Rockies are losers.

Not only that, but even if the Rockies did trade their best player and a potential Hall of Famer, they would be doing so to “restock the system.” In other words, they would trade a player who is possibly a loser by association with the loser Rockies for players who are so loserish that they haven’t even played in the major leagues yet.

Let’s put that into perspective. While each member of the likely starting rotation for the next calendar year, 2017, has crept past loserdom enough to have played in the majors, not a single one of them is even 30 years old yet. I’m not going to sit here and assume that 20-somethings are all lazy or anything, but I am going to sit here and assume that 20-somethings are losers.

This problem extends to position players. Four out of the eight starting expected position players are much closer to 25 than they are to 30. And it’s not like those other players have much to show. Every single player on the Rockies in 2017 has lost every single MVP contest for which he was eligible. That, folks, is a lot of losing. Sure, three Rockies “earned MVP votes,” as this website wrote, but that just means more visible losing.

All this losing, man. The Rockies are about the most losingest losers to ever have lost. They’re such losers that losers on blogs write about them.

But maybe we should look at the Rockies’ historical record in terms of climate and their record by year in terms of weather. That’s refreshing, as far as it goes. The Rockies will always be losers as sure as we’re all going to die by our own hand on a ruined planet. At the same time, there will be nice days that even the most defeated can still enjoy. If only 20-somethings weren’t such losers, those nice days would be coming sooner rather than later for the Rockies.