Sometimes, numbers DO lie.
The numbers say that the 2020 Colorado Rockies are among the better offensive teams in the National League. Even in the midst of a seven game losing streak that has seen an 11-3 start turn into a 13-15 record, Colorado has the third-highest team batting average in the National League.
If you’ve been watching, you know better. The Rockies offense is…bad.
Playing half your team’s games in Coors Field is supposed to equate in every Colorado squad being an offensive force. And for most of the team’s history, that has indeed been the case.
The vast expanse in the outfield at 20th and Blake routinely turns meekly hit fly balls into base hits. Batting average stats get inflated, especially when you’re evaluating an entire team. The Rockies have led the NL in team batting average 15 times in the franchises’ 27 seasons.
The fact is team batting average can be pretty meaningless. For instance, the juggernaut Los Angeles Dodgers are seventh in the NL right now, and the red-hot San Diego Padres are eighth. But each team is doing plenty of damage at the plate.
The game has evolved past the point where that means very much anymore. To be perfectly honest, the Rockies haven’t evolved with it. They had a chance to. They had a chance to join the “launch angle/exit velocity” revolution before last season. Instead, they elected to stick with the “old school.”
After two seasons that contained dual surprises – Colorado made the post season in 2017 and contended for their first NL West title in 2018, but had two of the weakest offensive seasons in team history – the Rockies needed to replace the oldest member of their coaching staff, hitting coach Duane Espy.
They could have looked outside the box, at someone like Arizona hitting “consultant” Robert Van Scoyoc, who ended up going to…Los Angeles. Instead, the Rockies hired Dave Magadan, who’d just left his fourth team, the division rival Diamondbacks, after three seasons in the desert.
Here are some numbers that do tell a tale: With Magadan as the hitting coach, Arizona saw its offensive production dip all three seasons. In 2018, his final year in Arizona, the D-Backs finished in the bottom third in all of baseball in average, on base percentage, slugging, OPS and strikeouts.
After parting with the D-Backs in October, he was hired by the Rockies in December of 2018. If this was an upgrade, it’s been hard to tell. Since Magadan arrived in Colorado, there’s been virtually no change from the Espy years. It’s not appeared to be any sort of upgrade, but rather more of the same. And it hasn’t been very productive.
It’s popular among a lot of us long timers like to say, “There’s no school like the old school.” We might be wrong about that. The teams that are excelling in MLB these days aren’t employing that same old approach. For example, the Dodgers – the team the Rockies and everyone else are chasing in the NL West – have embraced a new school “launch angle/exit velocity” approach. They hired the former college coach who was giving private hitting lessons, Van Scoyoc, first as a hitting consultant and then, in 2019 as one of two full time hitting coaches. He’s been credited by more than one young Dodger with revamping their swings and helping them take their careers to greater heights. Among those are last year’s NL MVP, Cody Bellinger. It can’t be a coincidence that the LA line-up, from top to bottom, is doing a lot of damage at the plate. The bottom third of the Dodger batting order is crushing the ball.
The old school Rockies? Not so much. Word is that Magadan isn’t much for working on swings, preferring to work with scouting reports and the mental approach to each at bat.
It’s not working.
Colorado has several top shelf prospects that need more than that. Imagine having someone who can make the same kind of impact as Van Scoyoc has working on the swings of Sam Hilliard and Brendan Rodgers? Imagine if struggling Nolan Arenado, David Dahl and Daniel Murphy had someone around them to give them something different to look at when they are trying to break out of a slump, rather than just the same old school way of seeing things?
They say you can’t teach old dogs’ new tricks. If that’s the case, perhaps the Rockies need to bring in a new dog.
Listen to Mark Knudson on Monday’s at 12:30 with Brady Hull on AM 1310 KFKA and on Saturday mornings on “Klahr and Kompany” on AM 1600 ESPN Denver.
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