I offer this disclosure (and these warnings, depending upon your proclivities):

• This article is about baseball.
• This article is longer than average.
• This article uses statistics.
• I’m a life-long student of the game but I have never worked with the Colorado Rockies or any other baseball team.
• These are the thoughts of a frustrated fan and management consultant looking in from the outside.
• There are references at the end of this article.

The Colorado Rockies are currently undergoing their annual tumble into irrelevance. As usual, Rockies management, beginning with Chairman and CEO Dick Montfort and descending through GM Dan O’Dowd, Assistant GM Bill Geivett, and on down to Field Manager Walt Weiss, bring up all of the reasons that baseball at 5280 feet above sea level is challenging and fraught with danger. We have been conditioned to believe, through constant talking points, interviews, and compliant personalities in the media, that winning at altitude is exceptionally difficult.

There’s one problem with that assertion: more than 100 years of Colorado Front Range professional baseball history does not support it.

Professional baseball has a long tradition in Colorado going back to the 1885 Denver Mountain Lions. In that year the fledgling league folded—that was a frequent event in those early days—but it reorganized in 1886 and the Denver Mountain Lions won the Western League(1) Championship that year. That was the first of many championships in the history of Denver’s pro baseball teams. At the end of the 1886 season, the Western League standings were as follows(2):

1. Denver Mountain Lions (elevation 5,280 feet)
2. St. Joseph (Mo.) Reds (elevation 885 feet)
3. Leadville (Colo.) Blues (elevation 10,152 feet)
4. Topeka (Kan.) Capitals (elevation 945 feet)
5. Leavenworth (Kan.) Soldiers (elevation 840 feet)
6. Lincoln (Neb.) Tree Planters (elevation 1,176 feet)

This auspicious beginning is—contrary to what the leadership of the Rockies would like us to think—representative of the next 100 years. The reasonable expectation of a competitive season—both in Denver and Colorado Springs—doesn’t evaporate until the Colorado Rockies come to town.

History is sporadic through the remainder of the nineteenth century but professional baseball becomes a fixture in the Front Range early in the twentieth century. Let’s examine how well those twentieth century teams did. Arbitrarily, I’d like to consider a first- or second-place finish as a successful season. How did the Bears/Zephyrs(3) and SkySox do pre-Colorado Rockies?

Performance collapses once the Colorado Rockies brought Major League Baseball to Colorado. Most interesting to me: the Rockies-era SkySox statistically mirror its AAA predecessors in Colorado. It’s only the Rockies that struggle to rise above mediocrity.

During the Bears/Zephyrs AAA years their major league clubs also performed well. The major league teams affiliated with Denver finished first or second in 16 out of 37 seasons. That’s 43% of the time.(6)(7)

The sample size is now rather large for both baseball at altitude as well as baseball supported by a AAA affiliate playing at altitude. Forty-three percent of the time was the reasonable expectation of a first- or second-place finish. That was the case whether we are discussing the AAA franchises in Denver and Colorado Springs or their affiliated big league clubs.

That is, of course, not the case with the Colorado Rockies. For the Rockies it’s 14% and every one of the “good” seasons was a second-place finish. Twenty-one seasons of Rockies baseball has created an entire generation’s worth of sub-standard performance to contend with. Such trends do not go quietly into the night.

In my role as a consultant I encounter many situations where outstanding professionals—skilled, dedicated, likable people—are not getting the job done and their organization is struggling. It revolves around chemistry and vision. Sometimes you have it and sometimes you don’t. It must be demonstrably successful vision, too, not just any vision. Without chemistry and vision good ideas often fail and initiatives to fix issues never gain traction. It takes more than great people to achieve consistent success. It takes the proper mix of great people with just the right vision.

In the past week, I’ve seen the local Denver media begin the usual, mid-summer call for GM Dan O’Dowd’s replacement. That won’t nearly be enough. From my experience—albeit experience outside of baseball—when a business has amassed a long-enough history of poor performance a rather insidious thing happens: the thinking that is consistently sabotaging results no longer comes from a few people but from virtually all leadership in the organization. In short, the organization has taken into its culture the aspects of poor performance that are at the core of the problem.

I know of only one way to fix it: clean house.

I don’t mean simply replace Dan O’Dowd and Bill Geivett. I mean virtually everyone in a position to influence culture and performance on the field should be deeply, skeptically looked at. Every coach, every manager, every scout, every special assistant, every trainer—everyone. This must be done without consideration to how long they’ve been with the organization, how talented they are, how well-liked they are, how well they did before they came to Colorado, or how fine a human being they are.

Let’s face the truth. Baseball mediocrity is now cast in stone in Colorado. It will be with us until it is forcibly removed by extraordinary means.

A reboot must occur not only at the major league level but throughout the organization from Rookie Ball to Blake Street. Anyone, anywhere within the Colorado Rockies organization who believes either through experience or indoctrination that it’s hard to win at altitude simply because the air is thin must go and be replaced by people that have not yet been programmed with this dysfunctional meme.

This is what faltering businesses across the planet face in times of crisis. They must self-reflect and honestly, critically, and clinically look in the mirror. Until the Rockies face the fact that they have established a two-decades long culture of mediocrity and take the painful steps to eradicate all contributory elements toward those two decades, the pain will continue.

Before the Rockies came to town the Denver Bears/Zephyrs and the Colorado Springs SkySox managed to field competitive teams in nearly half of all seasons. Half! I think every Colorado Rockies fan would be thrilled if they could come close to what their predecessors in Colorado achieved.

It is an unfortunate reality that businesses of all shapes and sizes find themselves in this situation: populated with “good people” that are loved, respected, and entrenched but the results simply do not justify the loyalty and the statements of confidence. As a leader, sometimes the kindest, most compassionate thing to do is the thing you most dread.

Clean house.

It must start with ownership. I’m not calling for Dick and Charlie Montfort to sell the team but it’s time for the Montforts to turn over all baseball operations to professionals. Let the Montforts do what they do really well—continue to make Coors Field one of the best experiences in sports. The Montforts love this team and love this town and want to win. I truly believe that. They simply don’t know how to do it and haven’t demonstrated an ability to make the types of difficult decisions necessary to get the organization on track.

I understand that they own the team and they can do with it as they please. I’ve had this discussion with owners before. Many business owners have had to come face-to-face with their weaknesses in order to save their businesses. Do what you do well and hire talented people to do everything else. The funny thing is this: most owners come to really love their new role once things are running better. Stress and worry are replaced with pride and excitement.

It’s time for big changes within the Colorado Rockies. This fan has had enough—enough cringe-worthy baseball, enough dashed hopes by June, and way more than enough of the newest versions of the same tired, discredited ideas.

Richard L. Montfort
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Colorado Rockies Baseball Club, Ltd
2001 Blake Street
Denver, Colorado 80205

Dear Dick,

While I don’t really want to bring back the Denver Bears I do want to rediscover their tenacity and ability to play competitively in Denver.

Please reboot the Colorado Rockies. Not a ctrl-alt-del warm boot. A cold boot. Power off. Unplugged. All memory cleared. Hard drive erased. Reformat. Reinstall.

Please do it now. Tomorrow is too far away for me. I promise to be patient while the new folks get settled in. At least then there would be hope renewed….

—JP

References

(1) It should be noted that the Western League was renamed The American League in 1901 and has been in continuous existence since that time. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_League_(original).

(2) Gregory Lalire, “Baseball in the West,” historynet.com (March 2011), accessed July 11, 2014, http://www.historynet.com/baseball-in-the-west-2.htm.

(3) The Denver Bears played in the Western League, American Association, and Pacific Coast League between the years 1900-1983 with some gap years. The team played in the American Association from 1984-1992 as the Denver Zephyrs. Over the course of those years Denver was in the farm system for the following teams: Boston Braves, Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, Detroit Tigers, Houston Astros, Milwaukee Braves, Milwaukee Brewers, Minnesota Twins, Montreal Expos, New York Yankees, Pittsburgh Pirates, St. Louis Cardinals, Texas Rangers, and Washington Senators. See http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Denver_Bears and http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Denver_Zephyrs.

(4) Baseball-Reference.com, “Denver, Colorado Minor League City Encyclopedia,” accessed July 11, 2014, http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/team.cgi?city=Denver&state=CO&country=US.

(5) Baseball-Reference.com, “Colorado Springs, Colorado Minor League City Encyclopedia,” accessed July 11, 2014, http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/team.cgi?city=Colorado%20Springs&state=CO&country=US.

(6) Wikipedia.org, “New Orleans Zephyrs (redirected from Denver Bears)”, accessed July 11, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Bears.

(7) Baseball-Reference.com, “Teams,” accessed July 11, 2014, http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/.