The Rockies Need A World Series Title
The Colorado Rockies have been a professional baseball team for over 30 years now and us fans would really like to see them win a World Series. With being from Denver or Colorado recently we have had the Broncos win the Super Bowl 7 years ago, the Avalanche win the Stanley Cup last year, the Mammoth being the most recent champion in indoor major league lacrosse, and the Nuggets have the best player in the NBA. The Rockies have been very overshadowed by these other teams and have not nearly done as well in their 30-year history. We did see them in a World Series in 2007, however, we lost and got swept by the Boston Red Sox. With this is mind I wanted to see how the Colorado Rockies compare to the rest of the MLB since the Rockies became a team, and why the Rockies have not won a world series.
To start, we can look at the one year the Rockies made it to the world series and got swept by the Boston Red Sox. In the year 2007, the Rockies had been winning most of their games. They were scoring an average of 5.28 runs per game and keeping their opponents to only 4.65 points per game on average. That year, the Rockies were winning each game by about 0.63 points, however, that does not mean that they won every game they played. The Red Sox on the other hand, the team that swept the Rockies in the World Series, were getting 5.35 runs on average per game, and they were keeping their opponents to only 4.06 runs per game on average. This means that the Red Sox were winning each game by about 1.3 runs. Over the whole season, the Rockies had scored 860 runs and kept their opponents from only scoring 758 total runs. The Red Sox, on the other hand, scored 867 runs in 1 less game and kept their opponents at scoring only 657 runs, just over 100 runs less than the Rockies.
What this data shows us on comparing the Colorado Rockies to Boston Red Sox in 2007 is that while both teams did similarly well on offense, the defense is where the big difference came from. With the Red Sox only allowing 100 points less than the Rockies did the defense clearly is the biggest factor here and is why the Red Sox swept the Rockies in the World Series in 2007.
Now we can look at how the Colorado Rockies compare to the whole MLB over the course of the Rockies' 30 Seasons, from 1991 to 2022. When you compare the stats of the Colorado Rockies to the rest of the league as a whole, you can see that the Rockies have a tendency to give up more runs than the other teams in the league and that the Rockies tend to lose by more runs on average than the other teams in the league.
In the entire MLB from 1993 to 2022, the teams combine, excluding the Rockies, tend to give up 4.62 runs per game, and score an average of 4.59 runs per game. The Colorado Rockies tends to give up 5.28 runs per game and score 5 runs per game. The Rockies tend to lose by about 0.28 runs each game. When looking at box plots comparing the total runs that all teams in the MLB have scored and have given up, the Colorado Rockies are in the top 25% of all teams for runs scored, however, they are the team that has given up the most runs in the MLB. Going along with that, the Colorado Rockies are also the team with the highest average amount of points that have been scored on them in all of the MLB, although, excluding outliers, they are the team with the most amount of runs per game on average. With all this being said, with the Rockies being a losing team, they are also in the bottom 25% for how many runs they win/lose each game on average.
When looking at these two different ways to view the Colorado Rockies, the 2007 season compared against the Boston Red Sox and every season the Rockies have been around compared to the whole league, it is very clear that the Colorado Rockies have a good offense where they are able to score a lot of runs. The problem that the Colorado Rockies have is with their defense, in all of MLB since 1993, the Rockies have been scored on more than any other team in Major League Baseball.
