Here's why Rockies' free fall is worse than historically bad 2024 White Sox

If you can't stand the sight of bad baseball, shield your eyes from the 2025 Colorado Rockies.

Just one season after the Chicago White Sox set the modern MLB record for worst season in MLB history, a new contender for the infamous claim to baseball infamy has risen. The Rockies are swiftly heading down a tumultuous path to top what the White Sox did and they're on pace to obliterate the not even year-old record.

Colorado's 9-46 record entering Wednesday is the worst in baseball. They lost in extra innings to the Chicago Cubs on Tuesday, 4-3, marking the 18th series this season they've failed to win.

Aside from having single-digit victories just a few days from the beginning of June, the Rockies' slow and grueling drift to the doldrums of baseball’s worst teams somehow feels worse than the White Sox’s free-fall last season.

When comparing the two abysmal seasons, Colorado’s outlook looks even more bleak.

Who would want this managerial job?

The manager of the worst team in baseball has a tall task. It's his job to keep things together despite plenty of losing, and there’s always the question of if/when it will be his last day in the dugout. For the 2024 White Sox and 2025 Rockies, both Pedro Grifol and Bud Black, were fired for their respective teams' poor performances.

Grifol was a dark cloud over the White Sox. Even before the losing, there was a disconnect between him, his players and the media. His firing last August after going 28-89 that season was addition by subtraction. It also opened up the path for the hiring of new manager Will Venable, considered around baseball to be one of the bright young minds in the sport. General manager Chris Getz is the running mate to help steer the ship of the rebuild.

Black, who had been in Colorado since 2017, always felt right for the Rockies, and the beginning of his tenure felt much different than the bitter end. Colorado made the postseason each of his first two seasons, but after that, with the departure of franchise staples like Nolan Arenado and Trevor Story, things began to snowball.

Back-to-back 100-loss seasons is usually a recipe for a manager to get fired. In the case of Black, unlike Grifol, his firing was falling on the sword for an incompetent organization that is more of a rudderless ship than a baseball team.

While the team’s third-base coach, Warren Schaeffer, has taken over on an interim basis, it’s not a job that is going to be highly sought after this offseason. And while there’s only 30 of them, whoever Colorado ends up hiring, is going to have an uphill battle from talent and organizational standpoints.

There's a glimmer of hope for one rebuild ... and it's not in Colorado

The White Sox were openly in a rebuild last season. After inheriting the reins of a beaten-down organization, Getz began a long, grueling process to turn the team's roster over and inject talent back into an organization that needed more of it.

On a team with several strong veterans, Getz moved them for prospect capital. The traded players included Tommy Pham, Tanner Banks, Michael Kopech, Erick Fedde, Eloy Jiménez and Paul DeJong. The trading continued in the offseason as the White Sox dealt All-Star Garrett Crochet to the Boston Red Sox for a huge prospect haul.

Conversely, the Rockies' roster doesn't have many, if any players who could help a playoff team. Many of them are young, pre-arbitration guys who are still trying to find their bearings in the big leagues. And with the exception of the team's best players — shortstop Ezequiel Tovar and center fielder Brenton Doyle, each highly unlikely to be traded — there's not much else to choose from.

Colorado's most-tradable asset is third baseman Ryan McMahon. The Rockies could have moved him over the past two seasons as he was productive and has a team-friendly deal. But Colorado kept McMahon and with each passing year, it looks like a bigger mistake. McMahon is having the worst offensive season of his career and while a team could still take a flier on him, the value lost over the past two seasons is immense.

To add insult to injury, even for being in a rebuild as long as they have, the Rockies don't have a ton of impact prospects knocking on the door of the big leagues like most rebuilding teams. Last season's No. 3 overall draft pick Charlie Condon is still in High-A and top pitching prospect Chase Dollander (currently on the IL) has already made it to the majors. That's about it for a while.

Brutal division adds more pain to Rockies' forecast

This is where things get tough for Colorado. The NL West is a monster, with two World Series contenders in the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres. The San Francisco Giants and Arizona Diamondbacks are both postseason hopefuls as well.

It’s not hard to imagine a world where all four teams finish the season with at least 84 wins. But if you combine the fact that you have four of the best teams in the National League in one division and the other team in the division is the worst in baseball, what you have is a recipe for an all-time bad season.

The Rockies are 3-13 against their own division and as the other teams in the division get better and likely add at the trade deadline, it could be a long summer in the NL West for Colorado.

The Rockies are on pace to go 26-136 this season, which would be 15 games worse than the White Sox in '24. And for a team on a winding path to nowhere and lacking talent or a plan to acquire it, Colorado seems destined to be MLB’s newest historic laughingstock.