Doofus Dick Monfort and the Shambolically Inept Colorado Rockies, a Story of Perpetual Self-Parody

I have resisted writing about my infamous hometown baseball team this season, in part because I already used up all my partisan Colorado blog tokens on Nikola Jokic and a Denver-based team who has earned the right to be in the national spotlight, but also because what the hell else is there to say, man? I don’t think the Colorado Rockies and their worst 50 game start in MLB history have ever been in the national consciousness more than they have this year, as they have set records for futility that haven’t been sniffed since years started with the number 18. We all know the Colorado Rockies suck to such a staggering degree that last year’s Chicago White Sox who set the modern record for incompetence look downright savvy by comparison. These stories about the Rockies’ new and exciting innovations in losing have been everywhere. I have no additional insight to add to this shambolic state of affairs slowly breaking me as a sports fan, and I figured I would let the expert sports writers at great outlets like the Defector properly articulate a rage I have been processing in Dick Monfort’s inbox all year ([email protected] if anyone is interested in giving the Rockies’ owner some feedback, sometimes he huffily responds!).

But now that rage has found a news peg worthy of making it into our little sports corner of the web at new Splinter, because it returns to a larger and consistent theme that resonates far outside my hometown: sports owners are a pox on society. The Colorado Rockies’ central problem is their owner, a wealthy schlub who does nothing for the city other than pretend to be a baseball man while running a baseball team that proves he is anything but. Dick Monfort’s story is a familiar one that residents of Baltimore or New York could understand, where a toxic combination of staggering ego, even more shocking cluelessness and unchecked greed come together to drive millions of baseball fans completely insane. Dick Monfort. Peter Angelos. Jeff Wilpon. John Fisher. These are names that live in infamy in the sports cities they immiserated. They are all part of a larger story.

But Dick Monfort is an extra delusional kind of owner. Peter Angelos’ cheapness is a dog bites man sports owner story, while the Monforts are like the Wilpons, a man bites dog kind of sports owner. The Rockies are widely regarded as the team furthest behind modernity in all of Major League Baseball, as they eschew any kind of knowledge gained in the 21st century and have a bizarre habit of over-valuing their own players to the point where they don’t make very many trades because they think that aging 32 year old veterans are just what a rebuilding 65-win team needs, then they turn around and under-value stars and then let them walk to other teams in return for nothing (see: DJ LeMahieu, Trevor Story). No one can ever understand why the Rockies do anything except for their braindead not-even billionaire, and the constant public embarrassment that has been this historically inept season has finally forced my hometown’s baseball autocrats to take drastic measures.

Dick’s brother and Rockies co-owner Charlie Monfort, who is returning to the team after battling years of alcohol addiction, said “we need a new set of eyeballs” this week, and doggone it, the Colorado Rockies made good on that pledge today. I am told that this moment marks a bright new future in Colorado. A team run by doofuses totally unmoored from all of baseball’s first principles has finally accepted defeat that their worldview has produced quite possibly the worst team this 150-plus year-old sport has ever seen. Now to take a big sip of coffee and read the press release to see what exciting fresh face is here to save my hometown.