The Rockies offense and entering the Abyss

Welcome to Football Friday (Season Two). The wildly popular weekly column has returned for a second year of diving into the theories, analysis, and fun of baseball. Every week we here at Football Friday will use all of our integrity and other things that sound impressive to deliver the best baseball column you’ve ever seen or ever will see. We at Football Friday, Inc. are honest, truthful, and most of all we’re serious journalists. Every single one of us.

Welcome to The Abyss.

This is the Rockies offense now. It is bad. For people who have followed the Rockies this season, this isn’t news. But it is new. For too long, the bad offense has hidden behind bad pitching as something the Rockies need to fix. How could we possibly worry about a bad lineup when Coors is always going to exist and the organization can’t develop talented pitchers? You’re crazy if you think the offense needs to get better. You’re a lunatic. What is wrong with you?

But now, in 2017, the year in which everything you thought to be true is no longer true, the Rockies offense is abysmally bad. It’s so bad everyone agrees that it is bad.

This is the Rockies offense now.

They can’t hide behind the Rockies pitching anymore. For the first time since 2009, the Rockies have a good pitching staff. It’s good enough that they don’t have to keep Jeff Hoffman in it if he’s not right. It’s good enough that a pitcher like Antonio Senzatela is on the border of even staying in the rotation even when he’s been worth 2.2 WAR. The Rockies used to live in this world where they had to make their young kids suffer their struggles because the team had nothing else. Now they live in a world where they can allow pitchers to develop, now they live in a world where they have good pitching.

Now the offense—this offense—can’t hide. In the Abyss, there is no place to hide.

This Rockies offense is so bad that the new Taylor Swift song took inspiration from it. (Editor’s note: Delete this hacky joke).

This Rockies offense is so bad I couldn’t even convince Nicolas Cage to co-star in a movie about it. I stand to roast this Rockies offense and I will not be denied my greatest opportunity.

The problem with the Rockies’ offensive struggles is it shows a further systemic issue. The offense has been bad for years and it hasn’t been fixed yet. It continues to have the same problem year after year and yet, here we are. They signed Ian Desmond instead of Edwin Encarnacion. They’ve clogged their outfield with expensive hitters They tried to be cute and gambled and lost. Why do they keep gambling?

The detractors will say that the Rockies couldn’t prepare for the drastic drop in production from Carlos Gonzalez and Trevor Story. That is fair and correct. Carlos’s drop off is unpredictable. He went from 40 home runs to 20 to maybe cracking 10 this year. It’s like he’s a baseball version of Dorian Grey and his swing saw a picture of itself and so it aged one thousand years in a matter of minutes. On top of that, Story’s strikeouts caught up with him and he looks like he has no plan at the plate. It’s all winding up into a mess of sadness for the bottom half of the lineup.

But, that being said, it wasn’t like the offense was good even last year, when Story and CarGo were lighting it up. In fact, even with that plus DJ having more power the Rockies offense was still below average in 2016. They could’ve seen this coming; they should’ve seen it coming.

This is the Rockies offense now.

Bad, depressing, searching for blame or reason. This isn’t just drag factor or Coors hangover. This is a bad offense—a bad lineup poorly constructed and unable to overcome their own self destruct button.

The Rockies offense is the first Death Star, built with a weakness that was easy to exploit. Now it’s being exploited.

Jake Shapiro called it out in April for BSN Denver. He predicted a bad offense, and people pushed back. How could he think the Rockies offense wasn’t very good? I mean come on! They have Ian Desmond batting sixth!

Well.

The offense is who we thought they were, so why are we all surprised? Why do we act like we’ve been led astray by an experienced archaeologist into a pit of snakes?

We’ve walked headfirst into the Abyss and then acted like we shouldn’t be here. This clearly is an Abyss meant for someone else. Why are we here?

This is the Rockies offense now.

Perennially bad and showing clear warning signs of regression and poor play, somehow still surprising us when they are bad.

We shouldn’t be surprised at where we are anymore. People posting about wRC+ and Drag Factor aren’t Dennis Quaid in the first half of The Day After Tomorrow. They are Dennis Quaid in the second half of The Day After Tomorrow. People have to believe them now because the world froze over and we’re all going to die.

This is the Rockies offense now. I can’t stop comparing it to disaster movies.

I’m worried people will go back to worrying about the pitching because that’s our eternal habit. We’ll blame the pitching every time we don’t get a quality start, we’ll yell about how Jon Gray shouldn’t have given up back to back doubles in the fourth inning so the Rockies lost 4-2. It’s easy. It’s simple. It’s comforting. Like a blanket that we should’ve thrown away six months ago.

It’s time to throw away that blanket. It’s time to start worrying about the way this team builds a lineup.

Welcome to the Abyss. We live here now. Maybe we always have.