⚾ Baseball Bytes: Are the '25 Rockies the Worst Ever?

And is this an excuse to rethink mile-high baseball entirely? Plus, a Holy rotation, and Mr. Ray gets his day.

Welcome to Baseball Bytes^¹ — a column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!

⚾ Rock Bottom

A general view of sunset at Coors Field during the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on June 28, 2023 in Denver, Colorado. (Kyle Cooper/Colorado Rockies/Getty Images)

Sometimes a bad baseball team can fly under the radar, its struggles lost in the day-to-day churn of the long season — until they become impossible to ignore.

Such was the case with the Colorado Rockies in recent weeks: After starting the season 3-9, Colorado embarked on a stretch with 1 win in 17 games, then followed a rare set of consecutive wins with another 8-game losing streak that culminated in losses of 10-2, 11-1, 13-9 and, finally, 21-0 this past Saturday — a football-like beatdown that was just the fourth shutout won by 3 “touchdowns” in the AL or NL since 1901, and was tied for the third-most lopsided shutout in that sample overall:

The next day, the Rockies managed to actually beat the Padres 9-3… then relieved longtime skipper Bud Black — the winningest manager in franchise history — of his duties after the game, along with bench coach Mike Redmond. (Former 3B coach Warren Schaeffer will be interim manager for the rest of the season, with hitting coach Clint Hurdle — also the second-winningest manager in Rox history — as the interim bench coach.)

At this point, the Rockies’ primary 2025 objective might be to simply avoid joining last year’s White Sox in pursuit of historic futility.