How the Colorado Rockies Pieced Together First-Half Success

DENVER – It’s the halfway point for the Colorado Rockies and a projection of 98 losses this season is not exactly a bad thing.

At 32-49 following Wednesday’s 8-6 win over the Boston Red Sox, Colorado feels worlds apart from the team who lost 119 games in 2025.

“If you’ve watched us play all year, we’ve been in pretty much every single game,” manager Warren Schaeffer said. “The team is getting better offensively. Numbers show that the pitching has gotten better all year. The way we run the bases is better, our in-game decision making processes are better, our preparation is better, decision making is better — everything’s better.”

Schaeffer learned a lot during his first 122 games as a big league skipper last year and the organization has taken notes over the last seven months since the front office was overhauled.

Team President Walker Monfort, President of Baseball Operations Paul DePodesta, and General Manager Josh Byrnes have helmed a series of changes throughout the organization in hopes of rebuilding a franchise that hasn’t played above .500 since 2018.

The complacency that hampered the Rockies over the past three seasons appears to have gone out the door with the previous administration. The new bosses at Coors Field understand that now is the perfect time to do certain things differently and, in some instances, experiment.

The Pitch Suggestion Experiment

When new pitching coach Alon Leichman was hired in December, the club had a bright mind to lead an up-and-coming staff of pitching coaches poached from teams around Major League Baseball. Leichman came over from the Miami Marlins where he and other pitching coaches produced a winning formula of suggesting pitches from the dugout to the catcher over the final nine games of the 2025 campaign.

Colorado utilized the same strategy during a bulk of the first half before suspending the experiment 3-4 weeks ago.

“It’s just what’s best for our ball club,” Schaeffer said of ending pitch suggestions. “There’s still a couple guys doing it, which is good. We just decided to go a different direction and give the catchers the first go-ahead with it.”

A team earned run average of 5.97 a year ago was the worst the sport had seen since the 1999 Rockies had a 6.01 ERA. Though the team’s 5.48 ERA still ranks last in MLB, it’s nearly a half-run improvement.

“They know what they’re doing out there, and it’s not like we need to prepare them to call pitches in the game. That’s not what this was all about,” said Schaeffer. “It doesn’t mean it can’t be (right) in the future. We gave it a go, and it’s not like it was a failure. We just pivoted away from it for the time being.”

Veteran Brennan Bernardino, who has spent 13 years pitching professionally, was one of the many pitchers on the staff to sign on to the ambitious attempt.

“I see the idea behind it, and I do think in time it’s something that baseball might change to,” said the 34-year-old southpaw. “We have a lot more data than we used to have, and I think we gave it a good shot. Who knows, it might be back later this year.”

Zach Agnos was like some who were indifferent to the new concept, but ultimately saw the potential in pitch suggesting.

“I told Alon, I was like, ‘If you see something that stands out that I do really well, then let’s absolutely attack it with that,’” Agnos said. “So, it’s been fun. I do enjoy the catchers calling the game too.”

Chaos On The Basepath

Next to increasing the floor of a roster that called a team record-tying 57 players to the plate in 2025, DePodesta and company wanted a squad that was more athletic on the bases.

In other words: steal a lot more bases.

Under Bud Black, Colorado had the second-fewest stolen bases in the National League from 2017-2025. On top of that, only the Pittsburgh Pirates — just barely — had a worse stolen base percentage (72.13%) than the Rockies (72.19%) during that span.

Colorado is tied for the 12th-most stolen bases this season with 59.

New acquisition Jake McCarthy leads the club with 12 steals and a total of nine players each have at least four. Only the Milwaukee Brewers have more players (10) reaching that mark this season.

In 2025, just five Rockies managed to steal four bases over the entire 162-game schedule.

“When you’re so non-aggressive for so long and just waiting for the big hit or whatever, there has to be a pendulum swing there for a culture,” Schaeffer said on Tuesday.

Even the team’s leading slugger Hunter Goodman is buying into the aggressive baserunning approach. With five steals through the first 81 games, Goodman is on pace to become the second active catcher after J.T. Realmuto of the Philadelphia Phillies to reach 10 stolen bases in a single season.

“It’s something that I’ve talked about with Doug (Bernier), our first base coach. There’s opportunities for me to gain a base, and I feel like you’ve seen how aggressively we want to play on the base paths here in Denver, and how we’re doing that as a team, and I want to be a part of that,” Goodman said. “I think I run well enough to be a part of that as well. I don’t think I’m going to ever steal a crazy number of bases, but I definitely think I need to sneak up on some people and get some bases.”

On April 8, Goodman became the eighth catcher in franchise history to homer and steal a base in the same contest. Two months later, he became the first to ever do it twice.

The team’s 72.0% stolen base percentage entering Wednesday is on par with the previous nine seasons, but eight clubs have been worse.

Standard school of thought is that safely stealing below 75% of the time does more damage than good. However, Colorado isn’t buying into that after years of stagnancy on the basepaths.

“The culture that we’re creating is going to be beneficial towards the World Series, if we went down the road here,” Schaeffer said. “I’m not worried about percentages. Each game holds its different circumstances.”

Losing 100 games again this season would mark the fourth consecutive campaign doing so, a feat that hasn’t been reached since the expansion New York Mets lost a combined 452 games from 1962-65.

The Colorado Rockies, however, are willing to do whatever it takes to turn around the future of their franchise with one pitch, one stolen base attempt or anything else that strikes their fancy.