If the Rockies were a restaurant, the steaks would bounce. The fish would bite back. You’d need a chainsaw to dent the bread.
With rats roaming the hall, patrons in pain and health inspectors beating down the door, Dick Monfort would fire the maître d’ and declare victory.
The real problem on 20th and Blake wasn’t the service.
It’s the menu.
It’s the head chef.
It’s the general manager.
Bud Black’s sell-by date passed ages ago. But Buddy didn’t sign Kris Bryant, did he?
Or Jurickson Profar.
Or Dakota Hudson.
“I think we all play a part of that (responsibility), right?” Rockies GM Bill Schmidt said late Sunday afternoon, after it was announced that Black had been let go as Rockies manager.
“At the same point, I’d say what we envisioned — the two guys in the middle (of the order) haven’t played. And then you have some other guys that haven’t performed that are starting to perform, OK? So it all plays in together. We all played a part in it.”
Some more than others.
“(Black) doesn’t swing the bat or throw the ball, right? And he can only do so much,” Bryant, a stand-up guy with a wonky back, told me Sunday, a few minutes after a stunned clubhouse got the news.
“He always had your six, at least with the writers,” I said. “Good times, bad times, whatever.”
“I’m sure there’ve been times where a manager doesn’t want to have the players’ back,” Bryant replied. “He just wants to say, ‘Hey, they (stink).’ (Black is) not the type of guy that would ever do that.”
Bryant was transferred to the 60-day IL Sunday morning, extending his ninth different visit to that list since Schmidt inked him to a seven-year, $182 million contract in March 2022. When that’s your signature move as chef de cuisine, you might as well burn the kitchen.
Schmidt inherited a 74-win roster in May 2021. Since then, the Rockies have won 68 (2022), 59 (2023) and 61 (2024) contests in a season. They’re on a darkly comic pace to win 28 in 2025.
Sunday’s 9-3 thrashing of San Diego was the club’s seventh win over its first 40 games, the worst start in modern National League history. He’s failed upward with the kind of G force that would crush a cosmonaut like a can of spinach.
“I have an utmost respect for Buddy as a professional. And as a manager, I think he’s a good baseball guy,” Schmidt explained. “It’s just we didn’t play to the standard that we needed to play.”
Except the ceiling of this clubhouse was — and is — only so high. That was never on Black.
Buddy wasn’t the difference between 62 wins and, say, 81 or 82 and creeping within shouting distance of the Wild Card.
That’s roster construction. That’s talent. That’s organizational depth. That’s drafting. That’s development. That’s teaching.
He didn’t trade for Jake Cave. He didn’t ship out Juan Brito.
The more bucks you think about, the more that wind up stopping at Schmidt’s desk.
“I think we’re capable of playing better than we played,” Schmidt said.
Not better enough. Certainly not capable enough. Yes, Buddy had to go, for his own sake as much as the franchise’s. The Rockies have been a zombie baseball club for five years now, moaning and trudging along the National League cellar, wandering the darkness, looking for brains to eat.
A new voice was overdue. Messages get stale. The Rockies were moldy, having allowed 10 runs or more over four straight games before Sunday, the longest streak of pitching ineptitude by a National League club since Houston in 2007. An unfathomable 21-0 loss to the Padres became a Saturday Night Massacre that finally shamed Monfort enough to cut to cord.
The axe fell Sunday postgame. It had been purchased overnight and sharpened over breakfast.
Black didn’t go back into the clubhouse again after Schmidt told him the news. Yet a line of players marched into his office, one by one, to say their goodbyes and to thank him personally. Michael Toglia shook Buddy’s hand and gave him a hug.
“It was man-to-man, professional, and I love him,” the first baseman told me. “We kind of lived near each other in the offseason, so I’m sure I’ll see him around.”
He loves Warren Schaeffer, too. The Rockies’ interim boss is 40, young-ish, and managed a bunch of guys on this roster as they were matriculating through Hartford and Albuquerque. Sometimes, a young clubhouse just needs a kick up the backside. What was it Crash Davis said in “Bull Durham?” They’re kids. Scare ’em.
“I think those are different generations, right?” countered third baseman Ryan McMahon, who was 2 for 3 with a home run in Black’s Sunday swan song. “The way that the game is now, I think a lot more positive reinforcement goes a long way, showing that you believe in guys, having somebody you can trust. Which we did … it’s just — at the end of the day, it’s execution. We haven’t been executing this first month and a half. And we need to do a way better job.”
The Rockies aren’t lollygaggers, per se. Schaeffer chucking a bunch of bats into the players’ shower room feels like a waste of good lumber. The freezer still stinks. The refrigerator still leaks. The cockroaches are still everywhere.
“We have to get better and move forward,” Schmidt continued, “I think we owe it to our fans to play better baseball.”
You do, but don’t stop there. Hire a replacement for the beloved, departed Kelli McGregor. Add people — baseball people — to act as buffers, as insulation, between Monfort and the front office. Give Schmidt better voices — not the same ones, preaching the same, tired, failing stuff, on the same insular loop.
Otherwise, what really changes, other than losing another fall guy? It took 21-0 for Monfort to move on from Black. How many more touchdowns have to be scored at Chez Coors for Schmidt to do the right thing and fire himself?
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Originally Published: May 11, 2025 at 7:46 PM MDT
