Grading The Week: With Colorado locked out of No. 1 overall pick in 2026, Dick Monfort’s Rockies can’t even tank right

Only the Rockies could find a way to somehow fail sideways The baseball wonks up in the Grading The Week offices have been trying to find a foothold to cling to during this already-lost Rox season When you re - as of Saturday morning that s a mighty slippery slope One that s made even dicier by the fact that the Rockies who were on a pace to lose games after Friday night s defeat in San Francisco aren t even eligible to parlay all this awful into the No pick in the MLB Draft Or the third pick Or even the eighth The icing on s cake in the face of Rockies fans Colorado is ineligible for the No pick or any pick better than th in because of MLB s new anti-tanking imperatives That s also why the White Sox whose -loss season in set a modern major league record for defeats are picking th in the draft Could defeats or more be on the table in LoDo this summer Association GTW was skeptical nine or days ago But after watching these Rox up close earlier this week we re starting to come around on the worst-ever train In fact we can almost hear it huffing and puffing in the distance Rockies historic start D-minus After games the - Rockies were somehow a battle behind the White Sox - when it came to lousy records right out of the gate From April -May Friday-Friday the Rockies went - If they keep that winning percentage up they d go on to post a record of - which would assuredly set a new low that would be hard for any big-league club to match Keep in mind though Like -plus wins or more losses are really really hard to pull off even for the largest part putrid of rosters FanGraphs com s computer projection as of late Friday had the Rox crash-landing at - PECOTA com - TeamRankings com - That s an average of - That s not quite or even defeats but it s very very reachable Why While the Rox have more talent than last year s White Sox they re also in an insanely tougher division It s not as if there are a ton of fringy veterans who could be flipped to a playoff contender that would weaken the current core that s on-hand and CEO Dick Monfort and the front office are notoriously hesitant to move franchise favorites at the deal deadline Only three hitters Jordan Beck Hunter Goodman and Brenton Doyle boasted an OPS better than as of late Friday night The Rockies MVP on the mound so far is ostensibly a -year-old middle reliever in Jake The Beard Bird who ended the week with the best ERA and WHIP baserunners per inning of any Rox pitcher to have logged at least innings so far A insufficient of the GTW kiddos grew up listening to Ken Hawk Harrelson shouting on WGN so you ll have to forgive them if chosen of his catch phrases and baseball aphorisms are burned into their brains But one of Hawk s repeated adages in contemporary years especially years in which the Pale Hose were awful was that an MLB club over the program of the season would almost reliably find a way to win and lose and that the finer points your stars your pitching your manager usually made the difference in those other games Of program then last year s South Siders came along and blew Harrelson s logic to smithereens And when FanGraphs pegs every other club in your division to win at least games you re arguably the No reason why Arrangement schedulers D During their respective first-round series the Nuggets and Avs wound up playing on the same day on five different occasions this spring If that seemed like a lot of unnecessary overlap guess what It was The two Kroenke Sports Entertainment franchises didn t share a single first-round playoff day in Or in Come on NBA You too NHL Was it something we declared