Have the Rockies reached a breaking point?

Baseball's single-season loss record, long held by the 1962 New York Mets, stood for more than 60 years until it was broken last year by the Chicago White Sox. But the new low might last only a year. At 7-36, the Colorado Rockies are off to the worst 43-game start in the sport's modern history, and while analysts are split about how serious a run they are likely to make at the loss record this season, the team will have to improve significantly to avoid a history-making disaster.

How bad have the Rockies been?

Baseball is a game where seemingly random bursts of bad luck can add up quickly to an undeserved fate. But the underlying data and metrics show that the Rockies have mostly earned their miserable record in the early going. They had the "second-worst run differential through 40 games since 1900," said ESPN. They've been bad as hosts and as visitors. "The Rockies are 2-20 on the road" and have "lost all 14 series this season," said Yahoo Sports.

The Rockies have also been almost implausibly terrible on both sides of the ball. They lead baseball in runs allowed per game with 6.4 — not surprising, given that the thin mountain air of Coors Field is by far the friendliest environment for hitters in the sport, as it decreases the movement on pitches. That makes the park "simultaneously a breathtaking place to watch a baseball game and a challenging venue in which to build a team," said The Athletic.

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But they are also near the bottom in both raw offensive totals — ranking 29th out of 30 in the sport with just 3.29 runs scored per game — as well as measures that adjust for Denver's ballpark effects, like OPS+, which ranks the Rockies' hitters dead last in baseball. The team currently features just two regulars who have performed better than the league average. Even in comparison to last year's record-setting White Sox, the Rockies are "worse. Maybe a lot worse," said FanGraphs.

What is the outlook for the team?

As bad as the Rockies have been, they may not have hit rock bottom. They have played comparatively few games in their own very strong division, the National League West, which features the lavishly-funded Los Angeles Dodgers as well as a "trio of strong contenders," said MLB Trade Rumors. The strength of their opponents for the remainder of their schedule means that "things may get worse in Colorado before they get better," said CBS Sports.

The team's outlook is also grim because the Rockies are widely regarded as the worst-run franchise in baseball. The Colorado Rockies, as "an organization, are utterly clueless," said Yahoo Sports, dubbing the club the "Rocky Mountain horror show." This is "perhaps the most insular organization in baseball," said Sports Illustrated. "They don't make trades," and the team's "major league development is poor."

While the Rockies aren't the biggest spenders in the sport, analysts agree that their predicament is not entirely down to their spendthrift ways. "Every crappy Rockies team since 2019 has cost at least $118 million to field," while ownership has "locked up their promising homegrown players and dipped into at least the middle tier of free agency with some regularity," said Fangraphs. It just hasn't worked out, which was never more clear than when the team gave oft-injured slugger Kris Bryant a seven-year $182 million contract before the 2022 season, "one of the worst contracts in franchise history," said Mile High Sports. Bryant has played in only 11 games this season and even when he's been on the field, he's been a disaster.

Not all the news is bad. Thanks in part to a strong bullpen, FanGraphs "projects them playing close to .400 ball the rest of the way," which would "help them avoid the fate of the White Sox," said ESPN. But overall, it is clear that the Rockies "need to turn things around, and in a hurry, if the wrong kind of history is to be averted," said Fox Sports.