2025 Team Previews - Colorado Rockies
As part of my 2025 team previews series, I go through all fantasy-relevant players on the Colorado Rockies ahead of the 2025 season.
Check out the intro and team links page here.
Intro
Baseball is unique among the major sports. All sports are unique to each other, but baseball is the uniquest. The most unique. Extremely unique.
Only in baseball do you have one of your teams playing on essentially a different planet and having their roster more or less dictated by that other planet. I remember that one sick season Ubaldo Jimenez had in 2010.
33 GS, 221 IP, 2.88 ERA, 1.15 WHIP, 24% K%, 10% BB%, 0.4 HR/9
There must have been some magic going on there. No Rockies SP has come anywhere close to that kind of performance in recent years. Going back to 2025, there have only been 16 pitchers who have managed 100+ innings with an ERA under 4.00 in a Rockies uniform.
The name Jhoulys Chacin is special to me. Back during that 2010-2013 run of decency he had, one of those years, I picked him out as a specific target of mine for the fantasy league I was (and still am) in. So I started doing the normal thing you do when you’re an overly confident teenager and in a fantasy league with your buddies - I started talking up this big-time sleeper I had. And I let the name leak out on draft day somehow. And then big Mitch, who once tried to jump over a bush but ended up deep inside of it, decided he would be a snake and take Chacin, so I couldn’t. He asks me what position he played (that’s how little anybody knew of this guy), so I lied and told him shortstop.
So Mitch’s pick comes up pretty late in the draft, and he’s over there on his little netbook (remember those?) looking up and down the shortstop pre-ranks for Chacin. He runs the clock the whole way down, and we’re like, “Mitch, what the hell are you doing?” and he goes on to admit that he was looking to snake my guy - but then we saw he actually bought the lie that Chacin was a shortstop. I’m not sure what happened after that, but I’m pretty sure Chacin had a terrible year, so it didn’t really matter.
To get back to the point, things have gotten so bad in Colorado that they seem to have completely given up on employing pitchers of any capability. Since the world restarted in 2020, we have seen a whole lot of Austin Gomber, Kyle Freeland, and Ryan Feltner. And then have guys like Chad Kuhl, German Marquez, and Chi Chi Gonzalez in and out of the picture, and it’s been really something to watch.
Half the game is pitching, and the Rockies just don’t even try to compete.
Back to the current day, the Rockies finished 20 wins above the White Sox in 2024. That would normally mean that Colorado had a non-pitiful year, but no - it was still a 101-loss season. You would think that the white flag waving on pitching would give them the opportunity to spend some resources bulking up their offense, but they haven’t done that either. They’ll never be a terrible offense with all of those Coors games on the schedule, but they have not been an above-average unit for a long time. Being a Rockies fan is a tough thing to do right now, but hey, at least you people in Denver can just smoke a bunch of pot and not think too much about it.
Let’s take an early look at the 2025 season.
The Roster
Charlie Blackmon has retired, so this is a younger lineup in 2025. There are only two men over the age of 30 in the projected lineup. That’s usually a good thing for a team coming off of a very bad season, but not so much in this case. We have seen a lot of the guys in this lineup, so we know pretty well who these guys are.
The rotation:
There’s so much job security in the Rockies rotation. We’ve heard these names for years, and none of them have been any good at all - but they keep getting plugged in there to take the beatings.
In a certain sense, being in the Rockies rotation might be the best job in the Majors. There are no expectations, and you don’t have to do very much to keep your job. To fully take advantage of that, you would need to be a grown professional athlete man without much of a sense of competitiveness or pride, and that’s probably rare - but who knows, maybe some of these guys have been beaten down enough to get there.
Needless to say, we won’t spend much time on the pitching side of things in this article. And I personally appreciate that. Writing 30 of these articles is a lot of work, so I personally thank the Rockies organization for cutting my work in half once a year.
Hitters
Brenton Doyle
Age: 26
Pos: OF
It was a breakout year for Doyle. He earned his way into the Rockies’ everyday lineup with his elite centerfield defense back in 2023. Then, he made enormous strides at the plate in 2024.
82 R, 23 HR, 72 RBI, 30 SB, .258/.313/.445, 30 SB, 25% K%, 7.6% BB%
A 20-30 season with a .258 batting average is worth quite a lot in a fantasy baseball league, and his 154 R+RBI wasn’t too shabby, either.
All of that was after a .203/.250/.343 slash line in 2023 with a 35% K%. That’s a ten-point gain in strikeouts, and the quality of contact surged upward as well (.258 → .333).
The one thing we notice is that his production was less than steady. He hit 11 of his 23 homers in July and had three months with an OPS under .700.
I don’t think that’s a reason to worry about him; we always take the full-season sample rather than slicing things up.
The barrel was high at 10.5%, and his contact rate stayed above 70%. The launch angle profile was strong, and he posted a 106.1 90th-percentile EV.
My point here is that the power is believable. I think he’ll be a pretty steady 20-homer guy, and there’s upside for more. All of that isn’t even to mention the main appeal of his fantasy profile - the steals. He swiped 22 bags in 2023 (about two-thirds of a year) and added 30 more in 2024.
It’s useful to talk about home-road splits with the Rockies to see which guys might be able to overcome the Coors Field hangover thing a bit more than others.
Home: .896 OPS, 22% K%, 12 HR, .262 xAVG, .342 xwOBA
Road: .633 OPS, 29% K%, 11 HR, .235 xAVG, .324 xwOBA
So we have a big gap with Doyle pretty much across the board. It’s not really actionable, as we are drafting for the full-season numbers. Being an elite hitter at home and a mediocre one on the road still turns into being a very good hitter. So let’s not get hung up on it - it’s just interesting to check.
There’s a lot to like with Doyle. The floor is high due to the steals and the job security. There’s also plenty of room for development since he remains in his mid-twenties with less than two full MLB seasons under his belt. I have just Luis Robert and Andrew Benintendi ranked right now in the outfield, and I think Doyle is really close to Robert, but I’m putting him ahead because of the better hitting environment and more reliable batting average.
Rank:
Projection:
643 PA, 80 R, 22 HR, 81 RBI, 27 SB, .241/.301/.418, $12.00 roto value
Ezequiel Tovar
Age: 23
Pos: SS
Tovar is one of these guys who came into the league so young that it’s surprising to see his age every time it comes up. He turned 23 on August 1st, and yet he has already racked up nearly 1,400 MLB plate appearances. Here are the numbers from 2024:
.269/.295/.469, .763 OPS, 28.8% K%, 3.3% BB%, 83 R, 26 HR, 78 RBI, 6 SB
He was caught stealing five times for a very poor 55% success rate. In 2023, he swiped 11 bags on 16 attempts (69% success rate), so it was a down year for the steals. The one thing you should know about Tovar, although I’m not sure how much it matters for your fantasy league, is his aggressiveness at the plate (and that might be a friendly way to put it):
He swings at everything.
The only thing that correlates with this is the walk rate and, therefore, the OBP. Swinging a ton is bad for your OBP - so he gets docked majorly in those league types.
The good news is that his high swing rate doesn’t have much to say about his strikeout rate (his strikeout rate is bad, but that’s not caused by the high swing rate) or his counting stat production. It doesn’t matter that much statistically. The point I’m trying to make is that poor plate discipline doesn’t hurt fantasy production nearly as much as you might think.
Let’s look at his year-over-year numbers to see if there were any changes/improvements in 2024:
Stat: 2023 → 2024
K%: 27% → 29% ❌
BB%: 4.1% → 3.3% ❌
Brl%: 8.1% → 9.0%✅
GB%: 43% → 34%✅
LA: 12.3° → 18.0°✅
FB EV 90: 102.7 → 103.7✅
SLG: .408 → .469✅
So the plate discipline stuff got a bit worse, but the batted ball profile improved, and the slugging followed. He pulled 48% of his barrels, a good number, and that led to a high 57% HR/Brl. If that doesn’t continue, his power numbers will probably take a step backward, because he does not hit the ball particularly hard:
Remember that the number we’re looking for with the orange bar is 105, and he came in well below that. Even so, he managed a 9% Brl%, and that seems to be a fair expectation for next year. All of this is to say that I think the 26 homers will prove to be one of the higher marks of his young career.
Tovar had a nice counting stat season (161 R+RBI) primarily because of the volume. He was 11th in the league in plate appearances and second in the league at at-bats, thanks to the lack of walks. He’s a very good defensive shortstop with a lot of years in front of him, so injury is the only thing that’s going to keep him off the field.
Here’s a quick look at the splits, which are surprisingly even!
Home: .766 OPS, 30% K%, 13 HR, ..235 xAVG, .289 xwOBA
Road: .753 OPS, 28% K%, 13 HR, .228 xAVG, .289 xwOBA
I can see a season where Tovar scores 90 runs, hits 25 homers, steals 15 bags, and hits .280. That is a very useful shortstop season. He was #8 on my shortstop player rater last year, so I think he’s clearly in the top 12 at the position in 2025.
Rank:
Projection:
678 PA, 91 R, 27 HR, 72 RBI, 9 SB, .262/.298/.459, $9.65 roto value
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