August 31, 2026
August 31, 2026
Colorado Rockies’ 2025 Season: A Historic Collapse
The Colorado Rockies’ 2025 season will be remembered for how far it fell short of even modest hopes. Colorado finished 43-119, the worst mark in franchise history. It stands as the fourth-most losses by any team in modern major league history. A rebuilding year with cautious optimism turned into an organizational reckoning. It cost a longtime manager his job. It emptied the roster of veteran trade chips and left a fan base searching for reasons to believe again.
Colorado entered spring training without Charlie Blackmon for the first time since 2010. The longtime outfielder had retired after 2024, taking a piece of the clubhouse’s institutional memory with him. The front office made only incremental additions. Kyle Farmer, Jacob Stallings, and Austin Nola signed as veteran depth. Owen Miller and Thairo Estrada arrived to round out the bench. The more consequential move came in late March, when Colorado sent Nolan Jones to Cleveland for infielder Tyler Freeman. That swap aimed to shore up a lineup still leaning on Ezequiel Tovar and Ryan McMahon to anchor the infield. Nobody inside the organization promised a playoff push. Even so, few could have predicted just how quickly the Colorado Rockies’ 2025 season would unravel.
The floor gave out before April had even finished, and it never came back. Colorado stumbled to a 4-20 record through its first 24 games. Only a handful of teams since 1901 had ever opened worse. The losses piled up in ways that defied explanation. Colorado tied the 1952 Pittsburgh Pirates for the second-worst 36-game start in history. Then came a Modern Era record: 36 losses in the first 43 games. By June 1, Colorado had become the first team ever to lose 50 games before recording its tenth win.
Every week produced a new indignity. Blowout losses became routine. Shutouts piled up, and the pitching staff bled runs at a rate the franchise had never experienced. This was not a slump that would correct itself with a hot week in May. It was a structural problem. The rotation and bullpen could not get outs, and the lineup could not punish mistakes. That combination doomed the season before Memorial Day.
Nine years of stability ended in a single afternoon. Bud Black, who had guided the club since 2017, was dismissed on May 11 after Colorado limped to a 7-33 record. Few managers have ever presided over a worse 40-game stretch. Warren Schaeffer, promoted from within the organization, took the reins on an interim basis with a roster already buried in the standings. The move signaled that ownership understood the crisis extended well beyond one bad stretch.
Colorado’s collapse was not the product of one broken unit. Pitching and hitting buckled at the same time, and neither ever found its footing again.
Kyle Freeland absorbed the toughest workload and the toughest results, finishing 5-17 with a 4.98 ERA across 31 starts. Antonio Senzatela went 4-15 with a 6.65 ERA. Germán Márquez, once the anchor of the staff, fell to 3-16 with a 6.70 mark. According to Baseball-Reference, the rotation’s collective ERA stood as the highest ever recorded by a starting group. The full staff finished at 5.99, among the worst marks in the sport’s history. Injuries compounded the damage. Rookie right-hander Chase Dollander battled a forearm issue and a patella tendon strain that interrupted an otherwise promising debut season. Ryan Feltner and Jeff Criswell each landed on the 60-day injured list.
The offense fared little better outside a handful of bright spots. Colorado batted .237 as a team, a franchise low, and the road numbers were grimmer still at .203. Coors Field, long a hitter’s haven, could not mask a lineup shut out 18 times. One of those shutouts was a 21-0 defeat to San Diego, among the largest blowout losses in more than a century of baseball. The Rockies scored only 228 runs away from home, the franchise’s fewest since 1963. That number told its own story about how little margin this team had once it left Denver.
Schaeffer’s promotion did not fix everything overnight, but it stopped the bleeding. That alone reshaped how the front office approached the summer.
Under Schaeffer, Colorado went 36-86, a still-brutal stretch but a meaningful step back from the 7-33 pace that preceded it. The interim manager leaned on accountability and a simplified approach. The results stayed ugly on paper, yet players and evaluators noted a clubhouse that competed harder than the record suggested. That steadiness was enough for the organization to remove his interim tag once the season ended. ESPN framed it as a bet that continuity mattered more than a splashy outside hire.
Once the standings made contention impossible, Colorado turned the trade deadline into an inventory clearance. Ryan McMahon, the longest-tenured position player left on the roster, was dealt to the Yankees on July 25. The trade, reported by MLB.com, brought back two pitching prospects. Reliever Tyler Kinley followed him out the door to Atlanta five days later. Right-hander Jake Bird joined McMahon in New York on July 31. Each trade chipped away at the roster’s remaining veteran presence. The signal was clear: 2025 was about restocking the farm system, not salvaging a lost season.
Hunter Goodman refused to let the season define him. His breakout became the one storyline Colorado could point to with genuine pride. The catcher hit .278 with 31 home runs and 91 RBIs. Those numbers earned him an All-Star selection and a Silver Slugger award. His 3.7 wins above replacement led every player on the roster by a wide margin. Mickey Moniak chipped in a .270 average with 24 homers. Jordan Beck added 16 of his own while playing nearly every day in left field. On the mound, Jimmy Herget, claimed off waivers before the season, quietly posted a 2.48 ERA across 59 appearances. He gave the bullpen a dependable arm amid the chaos. Dollander’s rookie campaign, injuries aside, offered flashes suggesting a future rotation piece once he returns to full strength.
Some seasons leave a mark that outlasts the standings, and this one will be studied for years. Colorado’s run differential finished at minus-424, shattering the modern-era mark of minus-349 set by the 1932 Boston Red Sox. That made the club just the third in more than a century to fall into the sport’s minus-400 club. The team allowed 1,021 runs, seven shy of the franchise’s own worst total, while scoring only 597. On the road, Colorado went 18-63, a single win from matching the worst road record of the modern era. Purple Row chronicled those numbers in detail. They placed the 2025 club among the most statistically overwhelmed teams the sport has ever seen.
The season closed on September 28 with a fitting whimper. Colorado fell 4-0 to San Francisco in a finale recapped by Denver Sports. Schaeffer did not dress up the moment afterward. He acknowledged plainly that the organization had a great deal of work ahead of it. That honesty captured the mood of the entire year better than any statistic could. The Colorado Rockies’ 2025 season stripped away any illusions about where the franchise stood. It forced decisions that had been delayed for years, touching everything from the coaching staff to a roster philosophy that had left the farm system thin. What happens next will determine whether this historic low becomes the bottom of a genuine rebuild. It could just as easily become another chapter in a losing stretch that has now reached seven consecutive years. Fans who stuck with the team through 119 losses earned the right to ask that question loudly. The answer will define how this era of Colorado baseball is remembered.
7th February, 2017
17th June, 2026
5th March, 2016
29th March, 2016
17th April, 2016
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