Some of my more faithful readers may remember that in my youth — and also in my first two years at the Rocky Mountain News — I was a sports writer and then sports columnist.
Loved the job, but left it to become a news columnist in the spirit of that biblical quote about becoming a man and putting away childish things.
So, as a man, I gave up covering the World Series and the Olympics and the Super Bowl and Wimbledon and the Masters and the Kentucky Derby and March Madness to cover wars, riots, school shootings, wildfires, 9/11, 7/7 and Donald Trump, among other tragedies.
But I’m still a sports fan, especially a baseball fan, and when I see the Rockies in a history-making freefall into the wrong end of the record books, I can’t resist writing about it.
It’s not quite a tragedy — nobody’s died, although plenty of hearts have been broken — but it is a disaster by any measure.
As even the casual fan knows, the 2025 Rockies have more than a passing chance to become the losingest team in baseball history. If you don’t keep up with the baseball standings — and you shouldn’t — the Rockies had a 6-31 record as of Thursday, tied for worst in Major League history after 37 games.
Meanwhile they’re an astonishing 18.5 games out of first, and even more astonishing, 13.5 games behind the fourth-place team in the five-team National League West.
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SUBSCRIBEThis is not bad. It’s cataclysmic. It’s unprecedented in a game where everything seems to have happened at least once before.
If they keep losing games at their current place, the Rockies would finish the season with a record of 26 wins and 136 losses — both records. They probably won’t be quite that bad, but who knows? For the record, the ’62 New York Mets, who were world-renowned for their ineptitude, lost 120 games. Just last year, the Chicago White Sox broke that record by losing 121 — and they, as several sportswriters have pointed out, had the new pope rooting for them. Who do the Rockies have — Lauren Boebert?
The ’62 Mets were in their expansion year, and the great columnist Jimmy Breslin — who wrote the book about that team called “Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game?” — observed that it wasn’t long into that first season before people were heard saying, “I’ve been a Mets fan all my life.”
Breslin continued: “Nearly everybody was saying it by mid-June And nearly everybody had a good reason for saying it. You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life.”
They were hapless and lovable and strangely sympathetic in a city that had just lost the mighty Dodgers and Giants to the West Coast. But in a few years, they would be the “Amazin’ Mets.”
These Rockies aren’t lovable. They don’t have once-great players in their final years. They don’t have players whose ineptitude has become a national punchline. They’re basically just ignored.
These Rockies aren’t colorful. They’re just plain awful. And they have been for a good while now. Long gone are the days of Larry Walker and the Blake Street Bombers.
The Rockies have never won their division. They did go to the World Series once, if you remember that 2007 Rocktober, when miracles still happened, when they won an incredible 21 of their last 22 regular-season games to get into the playoffs. They would win two playoff series — their only two — only to be swept in four games by the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. The Rockies are one of two teams that have never won a World Series game.
They had rising stars Troy Tulowitzki and Matt Holliday on that team, along with one-day Hall of Famer Todd Helton, and they were as amazin’ as the Rockies would ever be. These were truly glory days when one actually could dream of future glory. Two years later, they set a team record by winning 92 games. It seemed they were on a roll, but every other franchise in the major leagues has at some point fielded a team that won more than 92 games.
And the Rockies are the only team, according to people who somehow know these things, to have never, in their 33 years of existence, had a winning record over a seven-year stretch. That’s a baseball statistic for you, straight from a sport that lives and dies with numbers, from a sport that takes its history far more seriously than any other.
Playing at altitude — where pitchers can’t pitch and hitters get ruined for road games when they play at something closer to sea level and curveballs suddenly curve and sweepers suddenly sweep — is in part to blame for all this losing. Probably even more than the owners, the inept Monforts.
It may not be possible to field a consistently winning team at 5,280 feet, not even after they took the extreme measure of putting baseballs in a humidor to soften them up.
On the other hand, it’s almost impossible not to enjoy watching baseball on a summer’s night at beautiful Coors Field. Fans still go to the games, although not nearly as many as before when the Rockies were setting attendance records. Attendance is falling, and at this rate, plummeting might be on deck.
And for a franchise that has usually been middling, they are at their lowest point. On Wednesday, they lost both ends of a doubleheader by scores of 10-2 and 11-1. As bad as they are, the Rockies had never lost 100 games in a season until two years ago.They lost 100 more last year. And this year …
I know serious Rockies fans who are now rooting for them to be epically bad, and for two reasons. One, that epically bad is far more interesting than just your standard mediocrity. And two, in the faint hope that an epically bad year — following many routinely bad years — could possibly lead the Monforts to finally sell the team to someone who might have some idea how to win.
The Monforts won’t sell, but it doesn’t hurt to dream. It’s better than watching nightmarish baseball.
Sadly, I do know something about this. I was a sports columnist in Baltimore when the Orioles opened their 1988 season by losing 21 consecutive games. As one writer put it, that Orioles team all but ruined baseball’s traditional promise of spring renewal, the hope that any team, no matter how mediocre, might become a winner.
The Orioles lost their first game, 12-0. And so it began. Six games into the season, they fired the manager, Cal Ripken Sr., father to Cal Jr. and to his brother Billy who also played on the team.
But these Orioles were used to winning. Their two star players, on a team of stars, were first-ballot Hall of Famers Ripken and Eddie Murray. Fred Lynn also played for that team and a handful of all-star pitchers.
After losing their first eight, they went on a long road trip. I was assigned to go on the trip and stay until they won. Which didn’t come until their 22nd game.
I had packed for like six days. I got to the airport late and to make sure I didn’t miss the flight, I had to choose valet parking. I thought it would be quick and easy because those Orioles, who were bad the year before, were still way too good to be this bad.
The three main beat writers for the Orioles were also Hall-of-Fame great — Tim Kurkjian, Ken Rosenthal and Richard Justice. And they competed hard — harder, it seemed, than the team did — for every horror story that emerged from the streak. I was there to provide, uh, analysis — and some gallows humor — as to how they could possibly be this bad.
It wasn’t until the 16th game, I think, before I wrote, “We’ve gone beyond baseball. We’re now into the Kafkaesque. We’re now in the second reel of a Fellini movie, starring Eddie Murray as the Beaver. We’re sliding into a never-never land where — you saw this one coming — one team never, never wins.”
They lost by balking in the winning run. They lost by losing balls in the sun, once in a night game. They lost when a pitcher threw a shutout for nine innings, but still lost in the 11th, 1-0. In Kansas City, I think it was, the fans booed when the Orioles made an error. By the 17th game, Ripken was hitting .047. When they were in Milwaukee for game 15, the inimitable Bob Uecker said that the president will call when they finally win a game.
“Unfortunately,” he said,” it will be someone like Noriega,” who was then the infamous dictator from Panama.
In real life, on an off night late in the streak, manager Frank Robinson took the beat writers and me out for dinner. Robinson, who competed ferociously as a player, had been fired from jobs twice in midseason for being too hard on his players. But he had had this complete personality change. He took the heat for the players, told jokes to the press, and made the unbearable very nearly bearable.
Anyway, at the dinner, Tim Kurkjian asked Robinson if anyone famous had called him. He said the president, Ronald Reagan, had called him that day. We figured he was joking. Kurkjian, who knew Robinson liked to kid, asked him twice more, just to be sure. And Robinson — in Kurkjian’s telling — finally said, “Goddam it, the president called me today.” When Kurkjian asked him what the president said, Robinson replied: Reagan was sympathetic and told me he knew what I was going through.
Robinson then told the president: “With all due respect, you’ve got no idea what I’m going through.”
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And when the streak ended a few days later, in a 9-0 laugher that no one in the clubhouse laughed about, the Orioles had stocked champagne to celebrate the victory. The players didn’t want champagne. Champagne was for World Series winners.
Instead, a few players were seen pouring cranberry juice on each other’s heads. It was fitting, somehow.
The Orioles would go on to lose a mere 107 games that season. And the following year, they were in the American League East divisional race until the last weekend.
If the Rockies were to lose only 107 this year, it would be an actual cause for celebration. The over-under for the Rockies on FanDuel this season is now 117.5 losses, six more than the White Sox, and about 60 losses more than the Dodgers.
Hope, we’re told, springs eternal. But for the Rockies this spring, not to mention the rest of the season, it’s despair that is scheduled to be with us.
Interminably.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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