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In my opinion, our very first BP Local site ought to have gone to the Rockies. For me, sabermetrics ought always to be about seeking challenges, looking for problems sufficient to force us to come up with truly creative solutions, truly new ideas, and truly original problem-solving methods. Baseball is, after all, a trivial thing, and while it’s popular and interesting enough to make for thoroughly worthwhile leisure, I can’t encourage smart people to spend their time and mental energy on the game unless I feel that those people are putting their talents to a noble, global use. Maybe that’s dreaming too big, asking too much of the discipline of sabermetrics, and of the game itself. Still, that’s my approach.

Given that premise, yes, we should be spending way more time on the Rockies. We should be spending a ton of time on the Rockies. For someone who hopes to learn about more than baseball in the process of analyzing the game, the Rockies offer the richest potential case material. They are an expansion franchise (not only historically, but culturally). They are the most consistently lost organization in the league. Of course, they also play in the most extreme and vexing environment in MLB, and that’s where they differentiate themselves. For a quarter century, the Rockies have tried to solve the problem of winning big-league baseball games at unprecedented elevation (without totally flaming out when they have to play elsewhere), and have consistently failed.

The creeping consensus is that the biggest problem with the franchise is its fixation on the specter of its home field. Variations on “just find good players” have become common prescriptions for the maladies that plague the team. Russell Carleton’s essay in the 2014 BP Annual helped support this conclusion, finding (in part) that Coors Field accentuates the importance of pitching talent: good pitchers will perform better, relative to average pitchers, there than at most other parks, while bad pitchers will perform worse, relative to average pitchers, there than at most other parks. A few other studies have isolated certain ingredients in the most likely recipe for sustainable success as a pitcher at Coors: sliders instead of curves, big velocity (and the ability to miss bats with it), things like that.

I think it runs a little deeper than that. I think there’s a particular pattern the Rockies ought to follow when they set out to build a pitching staff that can keep them competitive. Happily, I also think a fairly stellar exemplar of the prospective Rockies Way already inhabits their starting rotation. In fact, I think Jorge De La Rosa, the long-time ace of the Rockies (a backhanded compliment if ever there was one, but it doesn’t always have to be this way), embodies everything it will take for Colorado to finally build a sustainable run-prevention machine. Let me show you how.

Injury Issues, Fading Fastballs
To understand De La Rosa is to see his whole career, as an arc, and not just his present self or his recent changes. Firstly, you need to know that De La Rosa has battled injury problems at several points throughout his career. It goes as far back as 2007, the last year in which he pitched for a team other than the Rockies. He missed six weeks with an elbow strain for the Royals that year, and they were sufficiently discouraged by both the injury and his poor results as to ship him to the Rockies the following spring.

In Colorado, a healthy De La Rosa suddenly flourished. He altered his delivery slightly, found more velocity, traded in his curveball for a slider, and enjoyed two strong seasons. In 2010, though, much of his first half was lost to a problem with the flexor band in his left middle finger—maybe a product of his increased reliance on a splitter-style changeup. Then came Tommy John surgery, after just 10 starts in 2011, stealing the rest of that season and the huge majority of 2012. In 2013, De La Rosa was healthy again, but 1.5 miles per hour were missing from his fastball, so he continued a trend line he’d been tracing for years already: throwing the heat less and less often. In April and May of that season, he was still going to his four-seamer close to half the time. By the end of the season, the frequency with which he used that pitch had fallen to 40 percent, and there were two late-season starts in which he threw his splitter more than his fastball.

Still, De La Rosa limped to the finish line that season. His ERA was fine—good, even, for a Rockies starter—but the underlying numbers belied that. For the year, he faced 714 batters, walked 62, and struck out 112. He kept runs off the board because he allowed only 11 home runs all year, but that’s less a recipe for success in Colorado than a taunting dance routine performed in Fate’s front yard. Even DRA and cFIP were at least somewhat fooled by De La Rosa’s stats, pegging him as something like an average big-league hurler, but De La Rosa himself knew better.

In 2014, he jumped out ahead of the adjustment curve and defied regression, by making another major change. He threw even fewer fastballs, and kept developing the splitter, but he also allowed his primary breaking ball to evolve into a third form. Remember, when he first joined the Rockies, De La Rosa had replaced his curveball with a slider that better suited the thin air of Colorado. The slider had been less and less effective as De La Rosa worked through injuries and changes in his skill set, though, so in 2014, he ditched that, too. This time, the replacement offering was a cutter.

The slider had been a potent weapon for De La Rosa, but it was too limited in its utility. He threw it over a third of the time against lefties, but less than 10 percent of the time against righties. The cutter moved a bit less than the slider had, but De La Rosa commanded it better. He threw it harder, in the upper 80s instead of the mid-80s. He was much more comfortable throwing the pitch to right-handers, and much more comfortable throwing it inside. He’d found another way to push back against the problem of his home park, and moreover, to keep his arm feeling fresh and healthy. He made his full complement of starts in 2014, and did so with more zip on his fastballs. His strikeout rate rose. He groundball rate rose. DRA said he was a three-win pitcher that year, and that valuation was more legitimate than his 2013 figure.

Still, De La Rosa knew better than to stand still. He’d gotten back a little velocity in 2014, but that was just his arm finishing its recovery from Tommy John surgery. The pitch was just never going to be hard enough or lively enough to lead the repertoire of a pitcher in Coors Field again. Nor was the sinker he had tried out in 2013 and 2014, a new addition unworthy of mention until now because it was a spectacular failure. De La Rosa never found command of the pitch, never figured out how to use it in the context of his arsenal, never missed bats with it. He was a starting pitcher without a viable primary fastball.

His response was the logical one, though not the common one: stop using his fastball as his primary pitch. De La Rosa lowered his fastball usage even further in 2015, to less than a third of all pitches. His split-change became his first option, not only his put-away pitch, but the one he used to dig out of holes, too. When batters were ahead of him in the count last year, De La Rosa threw his splitter 51 percent of the time. He threw the pitch almost 37 percent of the time overall. It led to his best cFIP (in anything close to a full season) since 2009, and another bump in strikeout rate (all the way to 21.4 percent, a really strong number for a Rockies starter) and ground-ball rate (to a career-high 54 percent). It also led to more walks, because De La Rosa threw a lower percentage of his pitches in the strike zone than ever before. But batters chased and whiffed at the highest rates of De La Rosa’s career, so working outside the zone (usually under it, with all of those splitters) didn’t hurt him.

It wasn’t a perfect season. De La Rosa lost starts to groin tightness, then a cut on his left middle finger, then Achilles tendinitis. His ERA and DRA were both the highest he has posted since he lost so much time to injury, though it’s pretty fair to say that he was actually better in 2015, and that the numbers just couldn’t quite capture it. Here’s what’s clear: De La Rosa is surviving by showing a willingness to adjust. Getting rid of traditional, spin- and movement-oriented breaking pitches; being willing to hide his fastball as it loses velocity; and focusing on hard secondary stuff that plays off hitters’ expectations and early reads of a pitch have served De La Rosa well. His adaptability is the best trait a pitcher could possibly have, if they wanted to succeed at Coors Field, which is why he has a 3.59 ERA there over the last three seasons. That’s the 58th-best home ERA among the 119 pitchers who threw at least 330 innings over that span—almost exactly average. For a Rockies pitcher, this qualifies as a minor miracle. Now, it’s up to the team to seek out other pitchers with the traits that made De La Rosa affordable and well suited to this adverse pitching environment, and cultivate those traits to the fullest possible extent.

Thank you for reading

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yibberat
4/06
Is Carleton's 2014 article online? I question the findings if they are that "Coors Field accentuates the importance of pitching talent". I looked at the last 5 years and found the reverse. Rockies pitching is perfectly mediocre/average (compared to their opponents at Coors - and NL West generally has vgood pitching) at home - and stinks to high heaven on the road (compared to the average MLB team on the road). Anecdotally, I think the same holds true going back to at least humidor.

IOW - they are not unsuccessful at Coors - even with a cheap mediocre pitching staff. Which does make sense to me also since altitude kills 'stuff' - but doesn't affect deception, pitch selection, funky deliveries, etc. Stuff is the stuff that aces are made of.

And I concluded the opposite of this article. When the Rockies find pitchers like JDLR, they just need to maximize his innings at home via 'platooning' a home/road rotation. Where they need pitching talent is on the road - and that isn't furthered by trying to find an entire rotation who can avoid getting Coors in their head. Find/develop pitchers who can deal with flexible scheduling - 3/4/5/6 games between starts. That is MUCH easier than finding an entire rotation of MLB starters who can pitch well at Coors - and well on the road too.
aquavator44
4/11
I don't think Carleton was measuring Rockies pitchers versus opponents' pitchers, home and away. From how Matthew described it, it seems more like Carleton concluded that good pitchers - regardless of whether they play for COL - perform better at Coors relative to average pitchers, and bad pitchers perform worse. Basically, pitching at altitude "amplifies" the "goodness" or "badness" of a pitcher, relative to his peers. The difference between the best pitcher and the worst pitcher is larger at Coors than any other MLB environment.
Kinanik
4/06
Could they have a home rotation and a road rotation? Maybe have 1-2 pitchers who are constants, and 3-4 that rotate in from the bullpen or the minors when they are at home or on the road, depending on their skill-set.

I don't see any established pitchers going for that, but with some MiLB guys and journeymen...

It probably wouldn't work! But it possibly could!
Kinanik
4/07
I realize now that I basically said what yibberat said. Whoops.