The Colorado Rockies lost to the Arizona Diamondbacks 7-2 on Tuesday, a score unremarkable enough that nobody outside Denver will remember it by the weekend, and that’s the whole joke: the loss was the one that made Colorado the first team in 61 years to lose 100 games four straight seasons.
Colorado was officially eliminated from the playoffs weeks ago, so Tuesday didn’t cost anyone a postseason spot. It just made the math official. ESPN put it plainly: the Rockies are the fifth team in the sport’s history to do this, joining the 1909-12 Braves, the 1938-42 Phillies, the 1961-64 Senators, and the 1962-65 Mets. The Braves and Phillies played before integration, when half the sport’s talent pool wasn’t allowed on a Major League field yet. The Senators and Mets were literal expansion teams, building rosters out of nothing because there was nothing yet to build from. The Rockies don’t have that excuse. They’re 33 years old, and they’ve had three decades to learn how this works.
Since 2023, Colorado is 220-423, twenty-three games worse than every other team in baseball over that stretch, according to Denver Sports; a run that bad doesn’t happen by accident, it happens on a schedule. Most rebuilds are a choice: strip the roster down, eat a couple of bad years, spend the savings once the timeline turns over. The Rockies never stripped down. They kept losing and still found $111.2 million for a 2026 payroll that ranks 22nd in the league, lowest in the NL West by more than $46 million and roughly $210 million south of the Dodgers. That’s not a rebuild. That’s a plant that keeps the lights on, keeps cashing the checks, and keeps shipping the same product every October regardless of who’s running the line.
Kris Bryant is the clearest item on the invoice. Colorado signed him to a seven-year, $182 million deal in March 2022, full no-trade clause included, and he’s been chronically hurt for most of it, including a degenerative lower back condition that’s kept him off the field almost entirely; he opened 2026 on the 60-day injured list. Fifty-two million dollars of that contract still runs through 2028, attached to a player who can no longer reliably suit up. That reads less like bad luck piling up and more like a check that got written once and never seriously revisited.
Owner Dick Monfort has spent parts of this stretch arguing that MLB’s financial structure, not his own front office, is the actual problem, pushing publicly for a league-wide salary cap paired with a salary floor. It’s a convenient place to point: the same owner running the sport’s least competitive operation for four straight years wants the conversation to be about a hard cap that would’ve blocked deals like Ohtani’s, not about what his own front office chose to do with the payroll room it already had. Colorado lost its regional TV deal after 2023 when AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain folded, and now runs its own streaming product; that’s a real financial hit. It doesn’t explain the Bryant contract, and it doesn’t explain finishing 22nd, not last, in payroll.
The Rockies did hire someone to fix this. Paul DePodesta, the Moneyball-era Oakland executive and former Dodgers GM, took over as President of Baseball Operations in November 2025, brought in specifically to overhaul what ownership itself called, per Yahoo Sports, a stagnant organization after a franchise-record 119 losses. Since then, Colorado has extended Mickey Moniak and kept Jake McCarthy and Hunter Goodman over available trade offers rather than make the harder roster calls a real teardown requires. The pattern that got the organization here survived the hire meant to break it; Colorado dangled seven players before last year’s deadline and still ended up back at square one.
Manager Warren Schaeffer offered the closest thing to a philosophy anyone in the organization has managed all year after the clinching loss. “You learn your hardest lessons in difficulty in life,” he said. “This is not easy… The guys have done that. We’ve just lost 100 again.”
https://twitter.com/MLBONFOX/status/2102598837471006918
It’s an honest thing to say out loud, and it’s also the sound of a manager narrating a streak his front office built the conditions for. There are real bright spots on this roster — rookie first baseman TJ Rumfield is hitting .300, and catcher Hunter Goodman made his second straight All-Star team — which is the part of the sentence where you’re supposed to feel better about all of it.
I don’t. The Rockies didn’t lose their way into this streak. They budgeted for it, then kept the budget, four years running.
