Colorado Rockies Draft Challenge

[Saevel]

2028 May:

While we lost a few series this month, we also had some very good ones, sweeping the Phillies, Mets and Cardinals. As it stands, the record shows 37-20, and we actually improved upon our great start, going 19-10 in May. We’re currently sitting on top of the NL by a comfortable margin, and things are looking good.








Hitting:

This month was a very good one for our batters. Only a couple of players were under 100 wRC+, with Jordan Beck really being the only one to struggle. We can afford to be patient with him for now, and we have Kris Bryant in his final contract year sharing time with him on 1B.

Ty Evans just keeps getting better, earning both NL Batter and Rookie of the Month with 7 home runs and an OPS of 1.090.

After a weak month of April Romo, Ritter and Amador improved, and are now all sitting closer to what we’d expect.

Our depth players Tucker, Palma and Montgomery all filled in very well when called upon.


Pitching:

Gilbreath, Jaden Hill and Helcris Olivarez were really good. Hill started 4 games, after Luke McNeillie injured himself on May 6th. McNeillie would return late in the month, to play one (excellent) game, and will continue to get starts going into June.

No pitchers were really bad, but Feltner and Rock keep showing what we already know- that they’re not really cut out for starting regularly in the MLB.

We have Jeff Alexander hopefully coming back toward the end of June, which should solidify our rotation.

PJ Poulin was sent down towards the end of the month, to make room for a returning McNeillie. He and Rudecindo will be standing by, should we need to call up a reliever. Out of our reliever prospects, Bryan Perez and Will Cannon are the most likely to get a call up after that. Should we need a starter, Hill might need to fill in again. We have Brayan Castillo putting up good SIERA-numbers, but giving up far too many homers, and out of our younger prospects, Grayson Hitt and Ervin Torres need some more time in AAA before we can move them up further.












Prospects:

Will Taylor fractured his fibula, and will be out for several months. It’s been an unfortunate few months for his development, but we will keep him around in AAA for a while, to see if he can reinvent himself.

Yanquiel Fernandez continues to play fantastic, and finished May with 7 games in a row with home runs. It’s getting harder by the day to keep him down in Albuquerque.

Another player on the cusp is Bryant Betancourt. He still has a couple of option years left, but should we need a DH besides Fernandez, he will likely get the call.





Drayk Bowen and Itai Goldner are settling into AAA baseball nicely. They both lack a bit to play in the majors, but it’s good to see that we have some prospects coming up that are adjusting well.







Ervin Torres has been promoted to Albuquerque, after 10 solid games for the Yard Goats. His injury history is a real concern, but he’s looking too good for us not to get a little excited. When healthy, he looks good enough to be in the middle of our rotation, and he will be given a shot sooner rather than later.

Here’s a progress report on some other prospects we feel optimistic about:

George Wolkow, 3rd overall pick from our first draft. Looks like a fantastic defensive 1st baseman, and a decent hitter with tons of power. Playing his first year in AA, and doing very well.





Chris Evans, 11th overall in the 2026 draft. Needs some time to mature, but is solid defensively and a good contact hitter- a perfect Rockies prospect. He was promoted to AA today, after spending last year in A+.




Adonys Velez. Taken 8th overall in the 2024 draft, this guy has been steadily improving. He’s currently playing A+ ball, but will likely be moved up to AA in not too long.




Brad Cloer, our first pick from last year, is playing well in A+. Like Velez, we expect him to be promoted sometime this summer.

[Saevel]

2028 June:



Well, it’s July, and we’ve been through our first rough patch of the season. We went 13-13, and had a handful of games where we were really blown out. Despite this, we’re still on top of the National League.

From the league rankins, what stands out to us this month is our improved base running and bullpen. Our overall record is now 50-33 (.602), which is just a game behind our pythagorean record of 51-32 (.614). We’re .512 on the road and .690 at home.


This is the lineup we've been using for most of the season (same against both left and right):





We've been using Kris Bryant quite a lot, either as DH or 1B, when someone needs a rest. We've also swapped in Montgomery for Veen at LF late in games to secure the lead. Bryant and Evans are very injury prone, which is why we're trying to protect them by keeping them off the field as much as possible.





The last game in our series against the Red Sox was a special one. Not only did we absolutely crush them 14-2, getting a 9K performance from Ryan Feltner, we also saw fan favorite Ezequiel Tovar hitting for the cycle at Coors. It was a nice moment for us- Tovar has been remarkably consistent offensively from the day we took over the Rockies. His first two years he served as our shortstop, before moving into a second base role. While being a subpar defensive player now, even in that position, our owner expects us to sign him to a new contract. His demands right now are 9 years of 28 million with several player opt outs, which is far too much. We will see what we can manage once we get closer to the end of the season, but this could be his last year with us.



Hitting:

Zac Veen and the aforementioned Ezequiel Tovar were our best hitters this month, both hovering around 1.000 OPS. Jordan Beck really got going, racking up 9 home runs, and hitting for .291 avg. Cole Tucker was also really excellent in the few games he played.

On the other side of things, Ty Evans had a dry spell. He struggled with some minor injuries, and only managed a single home run all month.

Pitching:

June was a pretty good month for us, pitching-wise. We had a couple of real blow-outs, where our starters allowed a ton of runs, but mostly things were solid.

Jeff Alexander returned for us, and was surprisingly shaky in his three starts. It’s his rookie year, of course, so we can’t expect too much of him yet, and we’re sure he will get into a groove as the season moves on.

The duo Hollowell and Gilbreath, while normally considered to be middle relievers, continued to be our best two pitchers. Both are Rockies prospects, so it’s nice to see them doing well. In fact, looking over our roster, Cole Tucker and Kris Bryant are the only players not home grown.


Lastly, an interesting snapshot of the budgets of all the teams this year. As you can see, only 5 teams have a smaller budget than us, and even within that budget we're among the teams with most space. Despite our budget, our fantastic owner is in "Win now!"-mode...

[Saevel]

2028 Draft:

The following fielders were selected to the all-stars team:
Drew Romo
Ezequiel Tovar
Ty Evans
Zac Veen

Amador and Doyle just missed out, going 2nd and 3rd in their respective positions, in the fan votings.

Angel Chivili was our only pitcher represented this year. This was a bit of a surprise, as his ERA of 3.98 is among the worst in our bullpen, and his WAR is actually negative, at -0.1. Gilbreath deserved better, with a SIERA of 1.64 and an ERA of 1.74.

In the prospect all stars game, we had two players represented: Brad Cloer and Bryan Perez.

Ohtani won the home run challenge, beating out Byron Buxton by a score of 23-20.


Before we get on to the draft itself, an announcement: The Rockies have signed Drew Romo to a huge extension- an 8 year 118 million dollar contract. Romo will make 14 million / year the next 5 years, then has a player opt out, before going into another 3 years where he will make 16 million / year. Should he stick around for the whole duration, Romo will be 34 years old going into the final year.

The Draft:

Outfielder Jimmy Boyle went first overall to the Royals. He looks to be a Zac Veen-type profile if everything pans out.

Our first round pick- number 25 overall- was Bobby McCarron, an 18 year old pitcher. Normally, we’d steer clear of such an undeveloped prospect, but we didn’t really love any of the options, and McCarron has a lot of things going for him. He has three fairly developed pitches, his control is good for an 18 year old, he has great stamina already, good height, good velocity and an excellent personality. On top of this, he’s not injury prone at all. It will be a while before we see him in the majors, but we have high hopes for Bobby.





Second and third, we took college shortstop prospects. We really need to shore up our infield for the long run, and in Jeff Murray and Danny Haines, we have two defensively strong players with some upside. Haines also has the range to play center field, should that need arise.







Fourth, we took a college pitcher with an incredible name: Red Horse Waxman. In truth, he’s a slightly undersized leftie sidearmer without great velocity, and will have to develop quite a bit to be a viable starter in the majors. But he’s durable, and a smart kid, so we took a chance on him.




We then took Jaime Sears, another young pitcher. He’s a long shot too, but he has a strong arm and he’s durable.





In summary, we took 3 catchers, 3 outfielders, 6 infielders, 5 potential starters and 3 relievers. This year, we went heavy on high school prospects, with only 8 college players.

[Saevel]

2028 July:

The Rockies got off to a good start in July, going 6-2 before the All Star break. After this, though, the wheels came off. We didn’t win a single series in the second half of the month, and our last series at home against Baltimore was pretty grim, seeing us get swept without putting up much of a fight.

We ended up going 11-13 for .458%. We’re still 1 game behind our pythagorean, so we can’t exactly blame our rough streak on bad luck either. Luckily, we’re still on top of the league, 3 games ahead of Arizona. We just started a 4 game series against them, so we have an opportunity to course correct going into August, and get back on the right track.






Hitting:

Offensively, July was bad for us. Drew Romo and Brenton Doyle did their part, and Cole Tucker had another fine month in his depth role. Beyond that, pretty much every hitter underperformed,

We don’t really have a ton of room to maneuver- Yanquiel Fernandez is waiting for Kris Bryant to leave the club, and we don’t have a player good enough defensively to take Montgomery’s place. Most likely, we will just have to be patient, and wait for things to turn around. We will probably make some slight changes to our batting order, and see if we can work out some kinks that way.

Pitching:

Our pitching was roughly what we’ve come to expect, but a large number of defensive errors combined with some meltdowns made things quite a bit worse than we’d hoped for.

This was a month where we finally made some changes, as the same names keep showing up on both sides of the performance-axis. On the bright side, Gilbreath and Hollowell had excellent showings, yet again. Jeff Alexander is fast establishing himself as our best starter, and we only expect him to get better. He was rewarded for his efforts with an NL rookie of the month award.

On the other hand, we finally got enough of Feltner’s erratic play. He was sent down, and in his stead, we first decided to call up Grayson Hitt. The 26 year old leftie looks comparable to Levi Wells on paper, and although he hasn’t exactly lit up AAA so far, we were interested in seeing what he can bring. Hitt pitched well for a couple of games, but got injured, and was replaced by another youngster- Ervin Torres, towards the very end of the month. Torres barely got to pitch, but will get some games in August.

We also sent down Reagan Todd, and called back up Isaac Rudecindo. Todd never really managed to put it together for us. As has been the case for a lot of our groundball pitchers, his ERA has been consistently lower than what his stuff and general ability would suggest. We’ve had the same issue with Stephen Jones and PJ Poulin, who swapped places in July, with Jones going down to the Isotopes and Poulin coming back up. Going forward, we will probably get rid of both, and just deal with having mostly right handed relievers. An option could be using one of our left handed starters as a bullpen piece, as we have quite a lot of them in Joe Rock, Alberto Pacheco, Grayson Hitt and Ervin Torres.