The Colorado Rockies made strides in 2016, finishing with a 75-87 record overall, and sticking around the NL wild card race until the end of the season. With further development from their young core and some solid free agent additions, the Rockies could be a sneaky team in 2017.
We’ll be talking about how the Colorado Rockies can improve next season with some offseason additions and tweaks to their roster a little later today, but for now we’ll take a look at the season that was for the Rox.
For the third straight season, the Rockies led the National league in runs scored, and with the infusion of young talent around Carlos Gonzalez and Nolan Arenado, that trend should continue next season.
The Rockies also bucked a trend that had followed them the past two years, which was having the worst staff ERA in baseball, climbing up to 27th with a team ERA of 4.91. The improvement over last year isn’t enormous as they held a 5.04 mark in 2015, but the upside that the stable of arms that the Rockies have right now is much better than in years past. With the additions of Jon Gray and Tyler Anderson, along with two more candidates in German Marquez and Jeff Hoffman, the pitching staff may become something of a strength for the club, if they can each continue to develop.
That said, the bullpen will need some work. For the season the Rockie relievers held a 5.13 ERA and an ERA- of 105, which is a bit worse than league average when adjusting for park factors. In the second half that ERA was a touch higher at 5.18 and their ERA- was 106.
One reason for optimism with the bullpen arms may be that they held the second-highest BABIP in baseball among relievers at .320, with the Twins bullpen being the only team to get BABIP’d more at .324. That said, the teams surrounding them didn’t exactly have good bullpens, while the teams on the other end of the spectrum were either playoff teams, or darn close.
Defensively the club was exactly average according to DRS (Defensive Runs Saved), which places them smack dab in the middle of the MLB rankings. Gerardo Parra was the worst defender on the team according to this metric, coming in at -8, and his bat certainly didn’t make up for his defense in the field. Parra walked nine times in 381 plate appearances for a BB% of 2.4, which was just edged out by A.J. Pierzynski‘s 2.3 percent as the lowest rate in the bigs among players with at least 100 plate appearances.